The Surgeon's Mate (43 page)

They did not see him again, and the weeks flowed by in such a calm monotony that presently the charged ampullae came to seem absurd.

The long, even days were marked by a steady thumping, by the whistles of foremen, by the distant crash of falling masonry and the cries of workmen as they demolished parts of the ancient building out of sight; the nights were perfectly calm, with never a sound but the murmur of the city like a distant sea and the deep bell of St Theodule's telling the hour. No hint of footsteps overhead, no sound from either side. They might have been alone in that great tower: they might even have been at sea, as far as their isolation was concerned; and there was something nautical about their small living-space and in the way they became so soon acquainted with it. On the other hand, the quality of their food was not nautical at all, oh far, far from it.

From that very first cup of coffee, the widow Lehideux gave the utmost satisfaction; her meals quickly became part of their daily pattern, and their chief diversion. She was very willing to do her best and she sent little beautifully-written, badly-spelt notes with suggestions according to the state of the market; and to these Stephen replied with comments on the last dish and recommendations, even receipts, for the next. 'It is only a woman's cookery, to be sure,' he said, toying with a chocolate mousse, 'and I do not know that I should trust her with game; but within these wide limits, how very good it is! She must be a knowing old soul, with great experience, no doubt in excellent service before the Revolution. Perhaps something of a slut: your amiable slut makes the best of cooks.'

Their daily life, though confined and dull, might have been very much more disagreeable. It quickly assumed an ordered shape: Jack did not exactly organize them into watches, but he showed them how the place could be brought to something like naval cleanliness with nothing but the most primitive means and a mere three sweepings in the course of the day. His pupils were sluggish, inept, reluctant, even sullen at times, and they particularly disliked hanging their blankets and their pallet-beds from Jagiello's window, piling all the sparse furniture into a pyramid, and swilling the floor before breakfast; but his moral force, his conviction that this alone was right, overcame them, and the rooms grew inoffensive at least, so much so that the former prisoner's tame mouse became uneasy and disappeared for three days. It lived behind the locked door in Jack's room and it came out of its hole in time for their first breakfast: though hesitant and confused at finding its friend gone and strangers sitting at the familiar table, it had accepted a piece of croissant and a little coffee held out at arm's length in a spoon; it sat with them while they discussed the methods of dealing with the surrounding filth, and all seemed well until the unfortunate orgy of scrubbing. The mouse did come back in time, however, and Stephen noticed with concern that it was gravid: he ordered cream - cream was eminently medicinal in pregnancy.

It did not need the mouse nor her condition to bring Diana to his mind; she was there a great deal of the time; but it did tend to bring these wandering thoughts - recollections of her in former days, riding over the English countryside with singular grace and spirit; images of her in India, at the Institut, in the streets of Paris- to a sharper focus. Diana would be well provided with cream. Would she also be provided with a lover, with a plurality of lovers? It was probable; he had scarcely known a time when it was not so, and the atmosphere of Paris was ideally suited to such things. Yet he found himself curiously unwilling to dwell on the subject; he preferred to think of the solitary huntress he had once known.

Order and cleanliness were the first things in Jack's day, but they were very far from being uppermost in his mind. Their first dinner had not arrived, the floor was scarcely dry, before he was looking about for means of escape in spite of the sickness that had made the others insist upon his taking the one good bed, while Stephen urged him to return to it.

Although the prospect was not encouraging - a sheer drop to the moat, an apparently impossible wall beyond it, and according to Stephen's recollection of a visit to the Temple in his youth, covered ways barring the moat on either hand, out of their sight - Jack found that others had been there before him: some patient hand had picked and picked at the setting of the bars in Jagiello's window, gnawing deeply but ineffectually into the stone; another had actually sawn through one of the twenty-four pieces of iron, hiding the cut with grease; indeed, an eye that searched with greater eagerness than any gaoler could find countless signs of their predecessors' passionate desire for freedom. Yet it seemed to him that most of them had set about it in the wrong way. Even if one had the tools one could not work on the bars without risk of detection; they could be seen from the judas-holes, and there was no telling when a patrol might come round: Rousseau and his mates wore list slippers, and they were rarely heard until the key was in the lock. The privy was far more promising: its projecting floor consisted of two spans of stone resting on corbels either side, with the necessary space between them; and if they could be removed the way was clear. The way down, at all events. Unfortunately they were built in the lavish medieval fashion, regardless of weight, and they were sealed into the masonry on either side with molten sulphur; but there was at least a possibility that they might be moved in time, and the discreet hanging that covered the entrance to the privy shielded the worker from view, providing all the time in the world. The difficulties would be uncommonly great however, and the place itself was very, very nasty; before exploring it farther he considered the door in the wall, the door used only by the mouse. A lever could work wonders with a door, even so massive an iron-bound, iron-studded door as this; but before working wonders it was as well to know where the door led. Stephen was of opinion that it might possibly open on to a spiral staircase in the thickness of the wall; the Templars had been much given to spiral staircases. But on the other hand it might only lead into other rooms like their own, and they would merely exchange one cage for another.

Rousseau provided no information about the door; 'it was shut' he said, 'it was not open. It was a very old door; they did not make doors like that nowadays.' It might have been prudence on his part, though stupidity seemed more likely than caution or ill-will, but they dared not press him. On other subjects he was more communicative, above all on the decadence of the Temple, 'the finest prison in France, whatever the Conciergerie might say - such clients - the whole royal family at one time, to say nothing of bishops and archbishops and generals and foreign officers, very select - no complaints, though some of them were here for years - always contented - shit-holes and running water in many of the apartments, for cells they could not be called. And all this going to rack and ruin - barely a score of clients now - that was why he could spend five minutes chatting with these gentlemen - in the good old days, with five or six in a room, he and all his colleagues were run off their feet - scarcely time for so much as good day: though it was true that they more than doubled their wages in commission from the cook-shops then, whereas now it was stark misery. Rack and ruin: the whole place was topsy-turvy, arsy-versy - governor had not been seen this last month and more - said to have resigned - deputy governor out of his wits and likely to be replaced.' As for the demolitions, his muddled account was obviously falsified by his wish that they should be kept to a minimum, but it seemed that everything except the great tower and perhaps its companion was to be swept away. Much had already gone. 'And how can you be expected to keep a prison just so in such circumstances, with workmen all over the place, disobeying the regulations?' he asked. 'It is more like a bawdy-house.'

All things being considered, the door seemed less profitable than the privy, from which free air and free-flying house-martins could actually be seen. 'Once we have shifted these stones,' said Jack, 'I shall make a rope of our sheets and reconnoitre the moat.'

He concentrated his efforts upon the jakes, therefore; but his efforts were not what they might have been. The crayfish, or rather their effects, were still with him in spite of Stephen's doses and his rigid diet: he was drained of strength and even at times of spirit. Stephen begged him to abstain from such a very noisome atmosphere. 'I do assure you, my dear,' he said, 'that if you continue to breathe the mephitic exhalations of six hundred years of misdirected filth, your escape will be by way of a coffin rather than a rope of knotted sheets. Come, let Jagiello and me take our turn at undermining the jakes, each for a stated period of the day.'

'Very well," said Jack, with a pale smile. It was but fair to let them have their turn, although he knew very well how it would end. He had no opinion whatsoever of Stephen as a man of his hands and not much more of Jagiello: landsmen seemed born inept and in addition to that Stephen was given to dreaming, to building hypotheses rather than destroying the Temple, and indeed he dropped their only nail down through the slabs into the moat below; while Jagiello was too volatile to accomplish much. He would be set to scrape a particular patch of filth or to scratch the mortar of a given stone, and then at the end of his spell (often cut short by Jack's impatience at his fumbling) it would be found that he had dispersed his efforts over much of the privy, exploring new crevices, clearing irrelevant areas of antique dung, and once even inscribing Amor vincit omnia on the roof. He would do his spell cheerfully, singing much of the time, but the prospect of escape was so very, very remote that he had no sense of urgency. He quite lacked the sacred fire that had enabled Jack to eat right through one of the seven broad Roman bricks that sealed the left-hand side of the inner stone in less than five days, using one of poor Madame Lehideux's knives, ground down to a slim steel tooth: then once his spell was over he felt that his duty was done, and would return to his window-seat, there to sing in his sweet tenor or to play the flute that Jack had mended. It never occurred to him to steal hours from the night to grind away at the massive brick and stonework, and indeed neither of them ever heard Jack at his self-appointed task, a gigantic rat gnawing at its cage in the darkness with infinite patience and determination.

In the end, as he had foreseen, Jack's turn assumed greater and greater proportions; and although Stephen and Jagiello protested that he did too much, far more than his fair share, they were obliged to confess their own comparative inefficacity. So, on a day of unusual activity among the workmen below, labouring unseen but clearly heard behind the wall on the far side of the moat, Jack was in his privy, Jagiello at his window, where their newly-washed shirts fluttered from the bars, and Stephen in the middle room, lost in thought, when the upper half of the outer wall fell with a long thunderous crash. The dust-cloud cleared, and there were the roofs and garrets of the rue des Neuf Fiance'es. All the visible windows were shuttered except for one, the nearest, and from this a young woman gazed at the great line of fallen stone. 'Oohoo,' called Jagiello, smiling and waving his flute: she was the first person he had seen outside the prison for weeks.

She looked at him, smiled back, made a slight gesture with her hand, and withdrew: but could be seen still watching him from within. After a while she emerged again, studying the sky, the perfectly clear and cloudless sky, holding out her hand to see whether perhaps rain were falling. Jagiello also held out his hand, she laughed, and they contemplated one another for some time with mutual satisfaction, making motions towards the fallen wall and putting their hands to their ears to show that it had made a noise in falling.

Stephen watched them steadily from a discreet point well within the dark middle window. 'Stay there,' he cried as Jack came backing out from his hole. 'Do not approach Jagiello's room. You may look from this window here. See: a female form. I believe we may have the classical situation - the captive, the maiden - it is ludicrously hackneyed. But if you appear, all is lost.'

'How do you mean, all is lost?'

'Brother,' said Stephen, laying his hand on Jack's arm, 'I am not a romantic figure, nor - forgive me - are you.'

'No,' said Jack. 'I suppose I ain't.' He peered through the central shaft, fingering his six-days' beard: it was bright yellow and all-invasive; Stephen's was black and sparse; Jagiello's face alone was smooth, as though the barber had passed that morning. The lady had returned: she was watering her pot-plants, unconscious of any gaze, and whistling gently to a dove in a wicker cage. 'Oh what a pretty creature,' he said. 'Lord, what a pretty creature,' and then in a strong, quarterdeck voice, 'Mr Jagiello, play a melancholy air. Then sing Stone Walls do not a Prison Make, d'ye hear me, there?'

Jagiello was still in fine voice when their dinner appeared: the young woman was watering her plants again. 'The worst has happened,' said Rousseau. 'I was afraid of it: they have started on the outer wall. Another month, and where shall we be? The finest prison in France flung down. I dare say they will put you in the Conciergerie, my poor gentlemen. No running water, no shit-holes there pardon the expression, only pots, which are low. And what will happen to me I do not know. Rousseau will be flung aside, his long services forgotten.' He put down the basket and said, 'It is immoral: it is what I call immoral.' He stared out of the window. 'Immoral. And illogical... illogical, that's the word. But at least you can see Madame Lehideux now. There she is, watering her flowers.'

'Let us hope they are aquatics,' said Stephen as he looked at the note lapped in his napkin. 'Or at least swamp-plants: nothing else will survive such assiduity. If the gentlemen have any washing, mending, or ironing,' he read aloud, 'B. Lehideux would he happy to accommodate them.'

'Oh, we do very well,' said Jagiello. 'Captain Aubrey was so very kind as to mend my waistcoat yesterday -you cannot see the tear - and he has already shown me how to sew on buttons and darn stockings.'