CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Bright sunshine followed the storm. Ben and Lotti came down to breakfast in rebellious moods, ready to inform Captain de Beauchesne and Clara that they would be continuing their journey alone, but neither of the adults was there.
‘The capitaine left an hour ago on a motorcycle which belonged to my cousin, who can no longer ride it because he has only one leg,’ said Madame Royère, as she served them hot chocolate.
‘Captain de Beauchesne has only one eye,’ Lotti pointed out.
‘For riding bicycles, one eye is better than one leg,’ said Madame Royère. ‘He has gone to make enquiries for you, poor children.’
‘What sort of enquiries?’
‘Ah, ça.’ Madame Royère shrugged. ‘I don’t know. And Mademoiselle Clara is sick. Well, she is crying, and has kept to her room. I know this sickness. It is a sickness of the heart. Also, you must take the father dog for a walk, he has been crying all night. So many dogs! Already I have had to chase away all the town children who want to see the little English puppies who were born on a boat.’
At the stables, Federico greeted Lotti with frenzied reproach. Elsie thumped her tail and allowed the children to admire the puppies. The four little black puppies were feeding gustily and already appeared bigger than yesterday, but toffee-coloured Delphine was just as tiny, and mewled pitifully as she tried to push in past her siblings to feed. Lotti picked her up, kissed her and tucked her in close to her mother. Then, with Federico on a lead, she and Ben went into town.
Ben gazed around curiously. Calais looked tired, like the Sparrowhawk two months ago when he came back to live on her, faded and battered and in need of paint and repair, but it was exciting to be here. Ben jumped aside at the loud clanging bell of a tram, he stared up at the tall narrow houses with shuttered windows. They walked past a café. He breathed in the smells of tobacco and coffee, and felt his blood run a little faster.
‘It’s so different from home,’ he said.
‘It’s certainly shabbier than I remember,’ mused Lotti, sidestepping an overflowing dustbin. I expect that’s the war, like in England. Or maybe it’s just that I was seven when I was last here. There’s a lot you don’t notice when you’re seven.’
The first thing they bought in town was a map, which they studied on the street outside the shop.
‘I reckon two days to get to the hospital site,’ said Ben. ‘So we’ll buy provisions to last at least that. Once we’re off, I don’t want to stop again except to sleep.’
‘Let’s find food supplies, then,’ said Lotti. ‘I’ll ask someone. Oh, Ben – look!’
She took his arm and dragged him across the street to a pâtisserie, with a dazzling array of cakes in the window.
‘That’s not shabby!’ she said. ‘Come on, I’m going to buy you an éclair.’
‘Lotti, there’s no time for cake!’
‘Ben!’ Lotti was shocked. ‘There is always time for cake!’
In a little square shaded with sycamore trees by the pâtisserie, while Federico stalked pigeons, Ben and Lotti sat on a bench to eat their cakes. Biting into her chocolate éclair, Lotti felt the years peel back. She was seven years old again, sitting with Papa in a café in the market square at Armande on the last day of the holidays, and he had bought her a cake as a treat.
‘Don’t tell Moune or Mama,’ Papa had said, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘You know how they feel about eating between meals.’
‘It spoils the appetite for lunch,’ seven-year-old Lotti had recited, hollowing the cream out of her éclair with a finger.
Oh, those summer holidays! And if Lotti were to eat cake in Armande again, would it taste the same without Papa?
She’s different here, thought Ben, watching Lotti. More French, like this was where she belonged, just like he belonged on the Sparrowhawk, but also more restless, like she was searching for something.
For the first time, it occurred to him that Lotti had never spoken of what she would do once they had found Sam.
*
They returned to La Belle Ecluse laden with parcels for the journey, and spent the rest of the day working on the Sparrowhawk. By the time Henri de Beauchesne returned late in the afternoon, the narrowboat’s interior was gleaming again, and the clean bedding was drying on the hotel’s washing line. Lotti and Ben were scrubbing the outside, watched from the roof by Federico, and by red-eyed Clara from the steps of the hotel. They all gathered on the towpath to hear what the captain had to report, Lotti noting with interest that Clara stood a little apart.
‘After much discussion with various parties,’ said Henri, ‘I have worked out the route you must take which will bring you closest to the site of the bombed hospital at Buisseau.’
He produced a copy of the same map Ben and Lotti had bought in town that morning, and showed them his proposed route. It was identical to the one Ben had worked out, except for its final destination.
‘I had thought to bring the Sparrowhawk right up to the hospital site,’ Ben said. ‘Nathan wrote in his letter that barges went there.’
‘Unfortunately, I have been informed that the river to that site is now unnavigable. Which is why I suggest this …’ Henri pointed again at the map. ‘Here, at the intersection of these two rivers, there is a convent where the religious sisters nursed many soldiers during the war. They are good women, and I am sure they will help us. By my calculations the convent is a little more than a day’s journey away from here by boat. Then it is about twenty kilometres to Buisseau by train from the local station of St Matthieu.’
Lotti, irritated, admitted to herself that this was helpful.
Henri turned to Clara. ‘I will ride ahead, Mademoiselle Clara, and alert the good sisters of your arrival.’
Now was the moment, thought Lotti.
‘Tell them,’ she whispered to Ben. ‘Say we don’t want them to come!’
‘Why me?’ he whispered back.
‘It’s your boat!’
‘I don’t know what to say.’ Ben was gazing at Captain de Beauchesne in stupefaction. ‘He’s so … efficient.’
‘All right,’ said Lotti. ‘I’ll do it.’
But she didn’t have to.
‘Captain,’ said Clara, in a voice that only shook a bit. ‘Could we talk?’
*
Henri and Clara walked together along the towpath away from the hotel.
‘You are so kind,’ Clara said, when they were out of hearing of the Sparrowhawk.
‘I’m not sure I am,’ Henri replied honestly. ‘I’m not sure I should be encouraging Ben to search for his brother. It seems to me a quite hopeless endeavour. What is your English expression? A needle in a haystack.’
‘Yes,’ said Clara. ‘You’re right, of course. But I’m awfully afraid he needs to find this out for himself.’
‘Mademoiselle Clara …’ Henri de Beauchesne blushed, uncharacteristically bashful. ‘The reason I am helping … Everything I have done, I have done for you. I must tell you …’
‘Oh, please don’t!’ said Clara.
‘You don’t know what I am going to say!’
‘But I do!’ Clara was close to tears again, but she also wanted very much to explain. ‘The thing is, I have just lost – there was this boy, this young man, I loved him so much, and waited for so long, and now … I have just learned that he is dead, and I don’t even know if I can love any more. I don’t even know if I still loved him – the feeling had become so mixed up with the feeling of waiting. Even my family, my parents – they disapproved of him so strongly, they threw me out of their home. I have been so removed from love for so long, I think I’ve forgotten what it is. So you see, I cannot – I mean, it would be unfair – I mean, I cannot ask you to help us more than you have already so very, very kindly done.’
‘Even as a friend? Even if I don’t mind that you don’t love me?’
‘Even so.’ She tried to smile, but it hurt too much.
Henri looked across the canal to where
a clump of daisies on the opposite bank danced in the afternoon breeze. He had a mad notion that he would like to wade across to pick them for her. But then he thought that the gesture would embarrass her, and also that she was the sort of person who probably preferred flowers to be left alive. He felt a surge of anger towards anyone who might hurt her.
‘May I ask – if it is not too indiscreet – why your parents disapproved so much of the young man you loved?’
Clara sighed, and he worried that he had offended her. But then she spoke again, very softly.
‘He was German,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t matter to me, and it shouldn’t matter to them.’
And then she left.
So much said, so much left unsaid. Clara, hurrying away from Henri along the towpath, wished she had the courage to go back to tell him that in another life, in other circumstances, she might have given him a different answer. He, recovering from her revelation, wanted to call out after her that Max’s nationality didn’t matter to him either, and that he would wait for her, just as she had waited for Max.
And also something else.
‘You are wrong,’ he wanted to tell her. ‘You say that you can’t love, but you can. You love those children.’
But Henri didn’t speak, and Clara didn’t go back.
Henri watched the water a little longer, then returned to the hotel by a different route, paid for all three rooms, spoke briefly with Madame Royère and left on her cousin’s motorbike for Paris, where he lived.
Lotti and Ben watched Clara walk listlessly back towards the Sparrowhawk.
‘Oh dear,’ said Lotti. ‘Ben …’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘We can’t leave her.’
‘We can’t, can we? Poor old thing, she looks so miserable. Someone has to look after her. Do you think she’ll mind sharing Nathan’s workshop with the puppies?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
At last, they were going to find Sam!
The Sparrowhawk left La Belle Ecluse at first light on Sunday morning. The canal was wide, flanked by crops of ripening corn and barley, and there were foxgloves and meadowsweet on the banks. The weather was kind, sunny but not hot. In the workshop, in a blanket-lined fruit crate, Elsie nursed the puppies, and at his favourite post on the bow, Federico clocked ducks, songbirds and kingfishers. The scene was peaceful, almost idyllic, but among the crew the mood was tense. Ben at the helm was in a trance, focused entirely on driving, the only way he could control his nerves. Seated on either side of him on the storage boxes, Lotti and Clara, understanding his need for silence, were lost in their own thoughts – Clara of what she had left behind, Lotti of what lay ahead, at Buisseau where they would look for Sam, and beyond that for herself …
About an hour out of Calais, something deep inside the Sparrowhawk’s hull began to rattle.
‘Shouldn’t we check what that is?’ Clara asked.
‘It’s nothing,’ said Ben.
‘It doesn’t sound like nothing …’
‘We’re not stopping until we find Sam.’
Shortly after lunch, they turned inland and came to a small town, where any sense of idyll was lost completely.
This, then, was what a country looked like after a war.
The town had been destroyed. The church was missing a roof. Most houses were missing walls. Over a shop, a once jaunty pâtisserie sign hung jagged over a hole where the door had been. And the trees …
‘They’ve all been cut down,’ said Lotti. ‘Why?’
‘They got in the way of fighting,’ said Clara.
Max had written to her of this once.
‘The poor trees …’ Lotti thought of the beech alley at Barton, the woods where the nightingale sang. The fate of the trees upset her more than anything. ‘They were just there. They didn’t choose to go to war.’
‘Nobody chooses to go to war,’ said Clara.
‘Somebody must,’ said Ben. ‘Or it wouldn’t happen.’
They sailed on, quiet but for the rattle of the Sparrowhawk.
Later that afternoon, in a meadow surrounded by wildflowers, they saw the shell of a fighter plane. Lotti, thinking of her parents, heaved over the edge of the bow. Clara went to comfort her but Lotti pushed her away, and sat frozen for some time holding Federico, staring unseeing at the landscape which looked so similar to landscapes she had visited with her parents, and yet which felt so different.
In the early evening, they passed a graveyard. It was a war cemetery, and it was not clear from the canal to which country it belonged, but it seemed to stretch for miles, grave after grave, some older, some freshly dug, each marked with a wooden cross. Ben cut the engine, and the Sparrowhawk drifted in silence interrupted only by the song of birds and the faint rustle of the breeze in a nearby copse, and they all thought the same thing but didn’t say it – that crossing the Channel had been child’s play compared to finding Sam in the midst of such monumental destruction.
They moored for the night under some poplar trees, by a field where brown cows grazed. They ate cold chicken and an apple tart given to them by Madame Royère, and they cuddled the puppies, but not even the soft sweetness of the little dogs could erase what they had seen. Later, when Clara had gone to bed in Nathan’s workshop, Lotti reached her hand down from her berth. Ben stretched up to hold it and they lay like this for a while, awkward and uncomfortable but not wanting to let go.
‘So many graves,’ whispered Lotti at last. ‘It seems …’
‘Impossible,’ said Ben.
‘But we’ll find him, Ben. You just see if we don’t.’
Ben squeezed her hand, then whispered, ‘Your parents. The plane. Lotti, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I brought you here.’
‘You didn’t,’ said Lotti. ‘It was my idea, remember? We brought each other.’
Eventually it grew too uncomfortable to keep holding hands, and with another squeeze they let go, though neither could have said who let go first.
‘It will be all right,’ said Lotti. ‘As long as …’
‘… we’re together,’ said Ben.
They both wondered, as they drifted off to sleep, when they had started to finish each other’s sentences.
*
On Monday morning, at about ten o’clock, they reached the lock that led from the canal to the river on whose banks stood the convent Henri had told them about, where the good sisters had nursed soldiers during the war. It was a relief to leave that canal, with its sombre memories. The river was lined with trees, and if there were horrors beyond them, at least they were hidden from view. And there was something different about being on a river instead of a canal. Rivers felt alive, thought Lotti, waiting at the tiller for Ben to return to the Sparrowhawk from the lock. This particular river was slow and lazy. It didn’t have the force of the Thames, or its sense of grandeur, but the feeling was there, an implicit invitation to come and play.
One day, Lotti promised the river, we will. But not yet.
They both had so much still to do.
‘Ready?’ she asked, as Ben stepped back on board.
‘Ready.’
Ben squared his shoulders and gazed straight ahead.
The Sparrowhawk rattled on towards the convent.
*
Sally had denied all knowledge of Lotti’s whereabouts when Albert interviewed her. She hadn’t seen Lotti since the night before the poor kid left for school, when she begged not to be waved off the next morning, because she didn’t want Sally to see her cry.
After the interview, Albert had missed the last train back to Great Barton, and spent Saturday night in a room above a pub. As he waited for his train on Sunday morning, he picked up a copy of the weekend edition of the East Kent Herald. His heart skipped a beat. On the third page, under the headline PLUCKY CHILDREN HEAD FOR THE HIGH SEAS, was the photograph the journalist had taken of the Sparrowhawk in Ramsgate harbour, with Ben at the helm and Frank and Lotti beside him.
In detective work as in life, luck will play its part.
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br /> Back at Great Barton, Albert Skinner went straight to Barton Lacey to inform Hubert Netherbury of his discovery.
‘I don’t understand.’ Lotti’s uncle stood in Théophile’s study with the newspaper in his hand, staring at the photograph. He did not invite Albert to sit. ‘What is this boat? And who are these people?’
‘I don’t know who the man is,’ Albert admitted. ‘The boy, of course, is Ben Langton.’
‘Who?’
‘The lad who has been sharing lessons with Charlotte …’ Albert faltered under Hubert’s glare. ‘It’s his boat. I’m sorry, sir, I assumed you knew …’
‘Well,’ said Hubert through gritted teeth. ‘I didn’t.’
Glowering, he stared at the wall behind the desk, then frowned. The painting which hung there was ever so slightly lopsided …
*
Albert left for France on Monday morning, with orders to drag Lotti back to England if he had to, but to do it discreetly. As the train pulled out of the station, he thought how curious it was that through all his conversation with Hubert Netherbury, not once had the man shown any concern about his niece’s safety, only outrage at her behaviour. Well, the girl had certainly made a fool of her uncle – running away, nicking diamonds, not to mention getting him to pay for Ben’s education, and the strange business with Malachy Campbell’s dog …
As for Ben, stringing Albert along for weeks about his brother …
He remembered the day he had told Lotti and Ben they had to go to school – even then, they had been defying the rules. They were a force to be reckoned with, those kids, no doubt about it.
But then, so was Albert Skinner.
PART IV
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Ben’s heart was in his mouth, and Lotti’s too, as he brought the Sparrowhawk alongside the convent’s rickety jetty. It was a lovely place, the river slow and lazy and fringed with trees, with dragonflies skittering over the surface and house martins flying low to drink. But it was also the place where the search for Sam on the water ended, and the search on land began.
Voyage of the Sparrowhawk Page 13
