Most Secret

by John Dickson Carr

  “Eh?” said Félix.

  Bygones rose up.

  “If you have made an end here, lad, we will take our leave. Captain Souter, I am onchantay to have had the joy of your connaissance, rip me in small moreso if I’m not! We will leave Scrivener Salvation Gaines in your tender care. Doubtless, when we are gone, you will wish to have speech with him.”

  There was a long silence.

  Félix slowly closed one eye. His great chest had swelled, and he smiled upon Gaines.

  “Monsieur,” he replied, obviously impressed with Bygones’s conversational style, “from de bottom of my ’eart, wit’ the pearly tear of gratitude which glisten at de corner of de heye, Félix Alexandre Charlemagne Souter desire to t’ank you. Ha, ha, ha.”

  The knife fell from Gaine’s hand and stuck point downward in the deck. Gaines whipped round.

  “This must not be!” he cried. “This cannot be! You are a villain, man Abraham; you are no better than a murderer! There are laws to be enforced, and English warships to enforce them!”

  He flew towards the windows, shouting, “Englishmen! Englishmen!” It was there that Félix caught him, and tucked him under one arm so that his cries were stifled. Then Félix bowed to the others.

  “My friends,” said he, “it desolate me dat I may not go on deck and say farewell. But I mus’ keep dis one quiet until de warships leave, and den I talk to him. Ah, one moment. Will you be kind enough, Mr. Abraham Bygones, to fetch me de knife ’e ’ave use himself? It is dere by your foot. One t’ousand t’anks, my friends both, and so good day.”

  Again he bowed as they went out, and they saw the look in Gaines’s eyes.

  The warships were preparing to leave for Dunkirk, as they discovered on deck. But Kinsmere could not think of this; he was feeling a trifle sick.

  “Bygones,” he said, “where did you learn about Mr. Stainley selling this ship? From Captain Murch, was it?”

  “Why,” Bygones answered with a meditative air, “so far as I know, he has not thought to recoup his losses by selling her at all. But I called to mind the tortured and elegant principles of diplomatic speaking; it seemed to me the effect was salutary. Let us go aboard the Saucy Ann,” says he, “and solace our woes with a bottle of rum.”

  XVIII

  SOUTHWARD LOOMED THE PURPLE coast of France, and the lights of old Calais were twinkling on the hill as dusk drew in. Idling at a bare two knots, her mainsail dark against a pink sunset, the sloop Saucy Ann crept in an almost windless sea. A creak of protest shook through her from bowsprit to rudder, but the quiet water slipped whispering past her bows.

  Leaning against the forward rail on the port side, Bygones Abraham and my grandfather watched the light die out of the wrinkled sea; shadows deepened; France grew vaster against the sky. They felt the slight roll, and heard a drowsy flip-flap of canvas. From well aft drifted the noise of an argument about a wench. Somebody was performing prodigies of music with the assistance of a comb and a piece of paper. A hoarse salt-pork voice began humming the tune, and then soared into song.

  To all you ladies now on land

  We men at sea indite …

  Other voices took it up:

  And yet would have you understand

  How hard it is to write;

  The Muses nine, and Neptune too

  We must implore to write to you,

  With a fal lal lal, and a fal lal lal …

  So close were they drawing to Calais that they could hear the bells from the Church of Our Lady, the bells of Our Lady were clanging and jangling, faintly, in slow discord. A peaceful discord over water: as though they were trying to speak both French and English at once; and neither could predominate, but only raised a din.

  It would be fitting comment. For possession of this town England and France battled throughout centuries. Arrows sang from its walls before the fourth Edward was king; its name (they say) is written upon Mary Tudor’s heart. So the bell clamour from the Church of Our Lady fell ding-clatter-clang across roofs and cobbled quais; lights sprang up in narrow stone houses; and even the sea began to turn purple in the mild French dusk.

  You would not suspect this sleepy, muddy old town of being at all associated with that most puissant and cold-faced sovereign, King Louis the Fourteenth. King Louis the Fourteenth has not yet attained his thirty-second birthday. But he has long set an example to other kings of slacker thoughts and dignity, or even less fashionable coats. He is a symbol. Awesome in a great mattress of a periwig, propped up on red heels to make him look tall, he is soon to be known, modestly, as the Sun-King.

  Across Europe range his lace-hatted generals, Turenne and the great Condé, carrying war to the Spanish Netherlands. At his back rises marble Versailles, changed from a shooting box to the most splendid palace of all the earth. On his lawn Fashion stands tiptoe like a statue; world-shaking commands are issued as to the set of a periwig or the twirling of a clouded cane. Art and music sit at his feet; the haut-lisse Gobelins are woven, one square yard a year, to glorify his name. On his private stage the playwrights may be seen beckoning—that so-witty M. Molière, who makes him smile at the antics of a poor bourgeois trying to be a gentleman, or M. Racine, with the stately tragedies wherein all the violence occurs off stage and does not disturb his ears with any unmannerly noise.

  Between the French and English courts, as represented by their theatricals, there is a curious parallel. If you feel drawn towards the rowdy robust English theatre, with its rowdy robust court besides, you may not be too enamoured of the stiff and brittle clockwork actors on the private stage at Versailles. At Whitehall Palace there is an open playhouse, with a gallery for Jack Public. King Louis would no more think of letting Jacques Bonhomme into Versailles than of letting him into an upper chamber of the Kingdom of Heaven. Jacques’s business is to work long and pay taxes, so that for Louis the Kingdom of Heaven may be (as decorously as possible) anticipated. Years afterwards Jacques Bonhomme will commence to think of this, and he will curse the Sun-King’s coffin as it goes past in the rain.

  But it is young Louis now, at his marble-topped table in a hall of cake-icing finery. Small fair-haired La Vallière worships him; his cunning runs on unchallenged; and three hundred men are required to assist him in the heavy labour of putting on his breeches. At this court there is no place for the mocking laughter of Charles Stuart. A little light music. A little light vice, and certain unpleasant vices as well. A proud little scene to be painted on the ceiling, with gods and clouds and cannon, and all underlings a-tremble. Bow down, ye stiff-necked Englishmen! L’état, c’est lui.

  Bygones Abraham, hearing the bells of Calais across the water, was in an oratorical mood.

  “Nay, lad,” said he, in a hollow and doleful voice like an oracle from its cavern, “never speak lightly or jestingly o’ the plight we’re in. ’Tis no jesting matter, mah fwaa it’s not! There’s His Majesty’s sister (God bless her) waiting in a ship called La Gloire for the terms of a secret treaty, and we’ve not got ’em. She’ll not come to England; there’ll be no treaty signed at Dover; the king will be several hundred thousand pounds a year out of pocket; and, worst of all, the plotter-in-chief is in a position to make His Majesty dance for ever. Oh, ecod! I hate the thought of facing that lady when we arrive. She looks little and mild; but she’s a clever woman, and she has a jaw. Still, it’s not much compared to the situation awaiting us at home. What our punishment will be I can’t guess, but …”

  He fetched up a deep sigh, and again had recourse to the stone bottle with which he had been fortifying himself for some time. Calais’s lights strengthened through dusk. The salt-pork voices aft, which had rumbled through several verses, sang on with undiminished zeal.

  Should foggy Opdam chance to know

  Our sad and dismal story,

  The Dutch would scorn so weak a foe

  And quit their fort at Goree;

  For what resistance can they find

  From men who’ve left their hearts behind?

  W
ith a fal lal lal and a fal lal lal …

  Bygones handed the bottle of rum to my grandfather, who took a deep pull and returned it.

  “Well,” Kinsmere said thoughtfully, “I hope we are not expected to go out and hang ourselves or some such nonsense. Because burn me if I’ll do it! Now that the dispatch is gone, in spite of our doing our devilish damned best to keep it, don’t you find yourself tolerably well pleased?”

  “Pleased?”

  “In candour, yes. These proceedings were none of the most honest, now, were they? Asking for bribes, selling his country—”

  “Shush!” muttered Bygones, peering round as though in fear of an eavesdropper. “Lad, lad!”

  “Well, don’t you think so?”

  “Oh, ecod! This is treason talk, no less!”

  “Why, as to that,” Kinsmere’s gaze searched the crowded masts in the harbour, “let us disregard words and think only of deeds. A considerable inheritance went down the wind when they desired me to go in with ’em …”

  “Ay, and you wouldn’t! Why, lad?”

  “I don’t know,” Kinsmere replied. And, as they both pondered this, it is a sober fact that he didn’t know.

  “At all events, and in strictest confidence,” he continued, “you can answer my question. Aren’t you tolerably well pleased?”

  Then, presently, Bygones began to chuckle.

  “Why,” says he, “it may be—it may just be—you are in the right of it. ’Tis the proper happy ending, with the villains all circumvented and the like; although,” added Bygones, taking another reflective swig at the stone bottle, “the heroes and the villains seem to have become most unconsciously scrambled. For the life of me, ecod, I can’t tell which is which. But it’s a profound moral lesson, this is, and shows the perspicacity o’ Providence. Whichever were the villains, we see clearly that right and justice have triumphed. This not-entirely-reputable treaty has been put aside or at least much delayed …”

  Then Kinsmere saw that he was winding himself up with rum for a profound discourse, and about to hold forth at some length.

  “Right and justice!” Bygones pursued affably. “Those twin glowing beacons which are as frankincense and myrrh crying aloud in the wilderness to the ears of a multitude grovelling in chains! And what’s the odds how the dice fall to rekindle ’em. I may be a-growing old, lad, but I’m not too old to pick up my bed and walk again, as I’ve been doing since I carried a pike for Langdale in ’forty-five. Wherever there’s fighting to be done, or a drop o’ good liquor for the belly, old Bygones will be walking not on crutches until they shovel him six feet under.

  “And what’s the result? Out of this business you get a rare fine lass in Dolly. And I make a friend of as good a fighting man (if you’ll allow me to say so) as I could ha’ wished for when the cavalry charges.

  “Truth and justice, we see, have been a-working from the first. In my lodgings yesterday, when you first told me the story of your ring, I thought you were a liar and a spy. And if,” said Bygones, exhibiting on his finger the blue stone of a ring that glittered in the last light, “if Providence hadn’t caused both our rings to be hollow so that you could show yourself an honest man—why, we’d ha’ cut each other’s throats. But here’s old Rowley outwitted, and justice triumphant. And all I had to do was pull sharp at the stone in the ring, like this, and it came open, like this, and—

  “Great body o’ Pilate!” roared Bygones, as though stung by a snake.

  Kinsmere, still looking ahead at the masts in the harbour, started and whirled round. Bygones stared with bulging eyes at the cavity he had disclosed when he pulled open the stone by way of illustration. Peering down at it, Kinsmere saw wedged inside a small object which looked like very thin paper folded many times over.

  “Every time we carried a message,” Bygones was saying vacantly, “we were obliged to pass in our rings to His Majesty—Do you remember? Last night? He called for both our rings; we put ’em on the desk; we saw ’em not again until we took our leave? Also, whenever a King’s Messenger calls on Madame, ’tis the same process.

  “Do you further recall, lad? On the table in the king’s private cabinet? Sheets of writing paper, fine and strong but so thin you could almost see through ’em? You observed those, did you not?”

  “I observed ’em, yes; I thought they were for some kind of chymical experiment, though it’s hard to say why I should have thought so.”

  “And the fine-quill pens on his desk; you marked those too?”

  “I did.”

  “Now open your own ring! Make haste and open it! Quick!”

  Kinsmere did so. A duplicate of the much-folded paper lay inside.

  “Oh, ecod,” gabbled Bygones, “don’t you see that with those heavily sealed half-sheets in the oilskin packets we were both carrying blank pieces of paper? Pem Harker said a true word: ‘Charles Stuart trusts nobody.’ But, whoever carried a dummy dispatch with the true dispatch concealed inside, he would guard his ring above all things because he believed it was useful only as a passport. And furthermore—”

  Bygones stopped for want of breath. Kinsmere took a long, refreshed look round the deck of the Saucy Ann.

  “Let me understand this,” he begged. “You would inform me, then, that the imposing document which Roger Stainley holds above the head of the king is as virginally white as the one they took from me?”

  “That’s it! Oh, body o’ Pilate, what an ingeniousness of tricks! And—”

  “And,” supplied Kinsmere, “the terms of the Goddamned treaty have been safely carried to Madame after all?”

  “They have.”

  “I see,” my grandfather said musingly. “Well, well well.”

  After a time, while Bygones was still chortling and chuckling and dancing with high glee, Kinsmere continued in the same musing way.

  “‘Profound moral lesson,’” says he. “‘Perspicacity of Providence.’ ‘Triumph of truth and jus—’”

  “We didn’t know it, true; but were just as successful as if we had known. Eh?”

  “‘Old Rowley outwitted.’ ‘Twin glowing beacons.’ H’m.”

  They fell silent for a moment. The voices aft had become silent too. Presently the grin of the Kinsmeres crept across my grandfather’s face, and he swung round.

  “Ahoy there,” he shouted along the deck to the sailor-men aft. “Ahoy there, hearts of oak and such-like! Accept my compliments on your noise. And, should you know it, will you sing the catch I shall name for you?”

  An enthusiastic affirmative was bellowed back by the flattered sailors.

  “It is only proper and fitting, hearts of oak,” said Kinsmere, “that on approaching a foreign port we should make some demonstration of true British feeling and honesty. Let us have ‘Here’s a Health unto His Majesty,’ all the verses. And see that it is good and loud, hearts of oak. It will have cost somebody near to a hundred thousand pounds!”

  L’ENVOI

  AT THIS POINT, FORTUNATELY or unfortunately, breaks off the narrative which was taken down in shorthand by Anne Kinsmere (Darlington) between the 1st and 18th June, 1815. The circumstance of its breaking off is explained in that excellent lady’s journal, and forms an escapade worthy of Roderick Kinsmere himself.

  Mrs. Darlington having been addicted to moralizing, her statement is of considerable length; I must beg leave to set down only essential facts. It will be observed that the foregoing story has eighteen parts, each one of which was told by Colonel Richard Kinsmere in the library at Blackthorn (called the New Library) on successive nights. It was a trying time for the whole family, as already explained. Of three young relatives in Flanders with Wellington’s army, one would appear to have been Colonel Kinsmere’s favourite grandson—Captain Barry Kinsmere-West, 40th Regiment of Foot (Somerset).

  From the beginning of June it had become evident that the Allies would shortly face the terrible Bonaparte. Colonel Kinsmere was doing his best to keep the minds of his listeners (and also, no doubt, his own) off t
he coming encounter.

  For eighteen nights, then, he detailed these adventures of his grandfather. He must have been recounting the last chapter when in a distant country darkness fell across grainfields beyond the village of Waterloo, with the Grand Army shattered and in wild retreat.

  Colonel Kinsmere did not break off because he was interrupted by news of the victory. News of the victory did not reach England until three days later. He broke off because in the telling of the final part on Sunday, June 18th, he drank so much port that he went upstairs inebriated and singing, and being in his eighty-fourth year, kept to his bed the next day,

  He had thoroughly recovered when he heard of Waterloo, together with a citation in the Gazette for Captain Barry Kinsmere-West. Then occurred the conduct which so much offended the later Mrs. Darlington. Colonel Kinsmere would appear to have danced a hornpipe before the eyes of his scandalized grandchildren. He then clapped on his hat and sallied down to the village. Hiring a coach at the Hound and Glove, he filled the rear boot with bottles of spirits, invited a number of villagers to ride with him, and himself drove the coach from Bristol to Taunton, crying news of the victory.

  We are possessed of thirdhand accounts by old men whose own grandfathers saw him, of that apparition thundering through the countryside. In his youth Colonel Kinsmere was a fine whip, but even as an octogenarian he seems to have outdone himself in the handling of a heavy coach over indifferent roads. He is remembered as sitting up there in a blue coat with brass buttons, his tall hat on the side of his head, singing a song called “I Pass All My Hours in a Shady Old Grove,” and drinking brandy out of the neck of a bottle.

  The narrative was never resumed. Or, if it was, I can find no record of it anywhere. Since it is a complete story in itself, however, we have ventured to let it stand in the present form. Those curious may be interested in the following extract, beyond a bare record of births and deaths in the parish register.