Nine Coaches Waiting

He was a man of few words. He jerked a thumb towards the north. I said: "S'il vous plâit, monsieur.” He jerked the thumb south. I said: "Merci, monsieur" and Philippe and I clambered into the back seat to join the other passengers already there. These were a collie-dog, a pig in what looked like a green string bag, and a rather nasty collection of white hens in a slatted box. A large sack of potatoes rode de luxe beside the farmer in the front seat. As I began, through the embraces of the collie-dog, to say rather awkwardly: "This is very kind of you, monsieur," the Renault lurched forward and took a sharp bend at a fairly high speed and still without benefit of engine, but now with such a succession of clanks and groans and other body-noises that conversation-I realised thankfully-was an impossibility.

He took us nearly two miles, then stopped to put us down where a farm track joined the road.

To my thanks he returned a nod, jerked his thumb in explanation down towards the farm, and the Renault after it. The track down which he vanished was a dirt road of about one in four. We watched, fascinated, until the Renault skated to a precarious standstill some two inches from the wall of a Dutch barn, and then turned to go on our way, much heartened by an encounter with someone who quite obviously had never heard of the errant Comte de Valmy, and who was apparently content to take life very much as it came. He might also, I thought cheerfully, be deaf and dumb. Our luck seemed to be ru

Our road ran fairly openly now along the hillside, so we kept to its easier walking. The lift had done something to cheer Philippe's flagging spirits; he walked gamely and without complaint, but I could see that he was tiring, and we still had some way to go… and I had no idea what we might yet have to face.

He set off now cheerfully enough, chatting away about the collie and the pig. I listened absently, my eyes on the dusty length of road curling ahead of us, and my ears intent on sounds coming from behind. Here the road wound below a high bank topped with whins. I found myself watching them for cover as we passed.

Half-a-mile; three-quarters; Philippe got a stone in his shoe and we stopped to take it out. We went on more slowly after that. A mile; a mile-and-a-quarter; he wasn't talking now, and had begun to drag a bit; I thought apprehensively of blisters, and slackened the pace still further.

I was just going to suggest leaving the road to find a place for lunch when I heard another car. An engine, this time, coming from the north. She was climbing, and climbing fast, but for all that, making very little more noise than the old Renault coasting. A big car: a powerful car… I don't pretend I recognised the silken snarl of that engine, but I knew who it was. The sound raked up my backbone like a cruel little claw.

I breathed: "Here's a car. Hide, Philippe!"

I had told him what to do. He swarmed up the bank as quick and neat as a shrew-mouse, with me after him. At the top of the bank was a thicket of whins, dense walls of green three or four feet high with little gaps and clearings of sunlit grass where one could lie invisibly. We flung ourselves down in one of these small citadels as the Cadillac took a bend three hundreds yards away. The road levelled and ran straight below us. He went by with a spatter of dust and the hush of a gust of wind. The top was down and I saw his face. The little claw closed on the base of my spine.

There was no sound in the golden noon except the ripple of a skylark's song. Philippe whispered beside me: "That was my cousin Raoul, mademoiselle."

"Yes."

"I thought he was in Paris?"

"So did I."

"Is he-couldn't we have-wouldn't he have helped us?"

"I don't know, Philippe."

He said, on a note of childish wonder: "But… he was so nice at the midnight feast."

A pause.

"Wasn't he, mademoiselle?"

"I-yes. Yes, Philippe, he was.”

Another pause. Then, still on that terrible little note of wonder: "My cousin Raoul? My cousin Raoul, too? Don’t you trust him, mademoiselle?"

“Yes," I said, and then, desperately: "No."

"But why-?"

"Don't Philippe, please. I can't-" I looked away from him and said tightly: "Don't you see, we can't take risks of any kind. However sure we are we've got to be-we've got to be sure." I finished a bit raggedly. "Don't you

see?”

If he saw anything odd in this remarkably silly speech he didn't show it. With a shy but a curiously unchildlike gesture he put out a hand and touched mine. "Mademoiselle-"

"I'm not crying, Philippe. Not really. Don't worry. It's only that I'm tired and I didn't get much sleep last night and it's long past time for food." Somehow I smiled at him and dabbed at my face while he watched me with troubled eyes. "Sorry, mon p'tit. You're standing this trek of ours like a Trojan, and I'm behaving like a fool of a woman. I'm all right now."

"We'll have lunch," said Philippe, taking a firm hold of the situation.

"Okay, Napoleon," I said, putting away my handkerchief, "but we'd better stay where we are for a little while longer, just to make sure."

"That he's really gone?"

"Yes," I said, "that he's really gone."

Philippe relaxed obediently into the shelter of the whins, and lay chin on hand, watching the road below him through a gap in the thick green. I turned on my back so that the sun was on my face, and closed my eyes. Even then I didn't want to face it. I wanted to go on, blind, cowardly, instinct-driven… but as I lay there listening for the engine of his car the thing that I had been trying to keep back, dammed out of mind, broke over me. And before I had thought further than simply his name I knew how very far I was-still was-from jettisoning him along with the others. Instinct might make me shrink from Léon de Valmy, and keep me a chilly mile away from Héloïse, but-it seemed-whatever evidence, whatever "proof' I was offered, I still sprang without thought straight to his defence.

Because you want it that way. Haven't you been enough of a fool, Cinderella? I stirred on the warm grass with sharp discomfort, but still somewhere inside me hammered the insistent advocate for the defence…

Everything that had happened since Raoul had entered the affair, everything he had said and done, could bear an i

But here the pleading memories whirled up into a ragged and flying confusion, a blizzard so blinding that, like Alice among the cards, I came to myself trying to beat them off. And I was asked to believe that these, too, were dead and painted like a pack of cards? Something to put away now in a drawer, and take out again, years hence, dusty, to thumb over in a dreary game of solitaire? Yes, there it was. For Philippe's sake I had to assume Raoul's guilt. I couldn't afford to do anything else. The child had only one life to lose, and I couldn't stake it. Raoul was guilty till he could be proved i