Chapter 23
The docks at Portsmouth were loud with gulls and cargo chains when Benjamin walked the gangplank onto the packet steamer, his bag over one shoulder, the anthology wrapped in oilcloth against the sea air.
The ship had already cast off, the harbor sliding away behind a widening stretch of grey water, when he saw them.
Maddox stood at the end of the quay, six men behind him, all of them still enough to have been watching the crossing for some time before Benjamin's eyes found theirs. Too far now for either party to close the distance. Close enough that neither man could pretend the other had not been seen.
Benjamin inclined his head.
Maddox did not move at all.
Then the harbor and the men on it dissolved slowly into the widening grey, and Benjamin turned back toward the open water ahead and did not look behind him again.
He spent most of the crossing below deck with the anthology open across his knees, working through the pressed pages one at a time by lamplight — comfrey, feverfew, the small careful drawings Amelia had made of things that grew in soil she knew — memorizing the shape of the one flower in it he had never seen alive.
The ship rolled steadily beneath him, the lamp swinging with it, and somewhere past midnight he stopped reading and simply held the book closed against his chest, listening to the water working against the hull, and thought about a garden with a hole in its fence and a woman who had told him once that everything needed room to grow.
He did not sleep. He had not slept properly since the fire, and had stopped expecting to until this was finished.
France came up out of the fog before dawn — grey stone and grey gulls, and then the coach roads unspooling south and east through towns he did not stop to learn the names of.
He paid what was asked without arguing, ate what was put in front of him, and kept his eyes on the road behind as often as the road ahead, though nothing came of the watching for three days running.
By the fourth day the land had begun to climb.
Green fields gave way to terraced vineyards, and the vineyards gave way, slowly, to grey stone villages clinging to hillsides too steep for anything but goats and stubborn men.
The air changed before the landscape did — thinner, colder, carrying the particular mineral smell of high ground that Benjamin's body remembered before his mind had fully caught up to where he was.
He did not think of Amelia constantly. He thought of her at odd, unguarded moments instead — a church bell that sounded, briefly, like the one at Ashcombe; a woman on a distant terrace with blonde hair loose in the wind, gone the instant he looked properly — and each time it happened he let himself have it for exactly as long as it lasted, and no longer, because a man could not climb a mountain carrying that kind of weight the whole way up it.
The town at the base of the Alps had not changed at all.
He knew it before the whole of it had even come into view — the crooked church spire, the narrow street running down toward the low stone inn where he had once eaten with men who were, within the year, already dead. He went in without hesitation and took the seat nearest the fire.
The barman studied him a long moment before he spoke.
"I have heard talk," Benjamin said, once the stew had come, "of a village higher up the mountain. That people from this village come here for supplies, now and again. A tribe of some kind, living apart."
The barman's face closed over, polite but immovable. "You would do well not to believe everything you are told, monsieur. This is eighteen seventy-three. There are no such things left in these mountains."
Benjamin allowed himself a small, patient smile. "You may not remember me. It has been some years. My unit came through here once, arresting a French general who had hidden in this valley."
The barman went very still, wariness sharpening in his eyes. "It would be wise, monsieur, not to speak of that too freely in this town."
Benjamin rose from the bench, unhurried. "If memory serves, that man was wanted by your own government as much as by mine. We handled the matter quietly, rather than burning your valley to the ground looking for him."
Something in the barman's face gave way all at once.
"We have not forgotten how you managed it." He inclined his head. "Good fortune on your climb, monsieur. I hope you find what you have come so far to look for."
Benjamin settled his account, shouldered his bag, and stepped back out into air gone sharp and thin with altitude.
The mountain rose ahead of him, white and vast against a darkening sky.
He began to walk toward it.
◆◆◆
The snow had thickened by midday, and Benjamin was picking his way along a narrow shelf of rock when he felt it — the particular pressure of being watched, old and familiar enough that his body answered it before his mind had finished naming it.
He stopped. Turned.
"It is hard to hide in snow," he said, to the empty slope above him. "Particularly when there is so little up here that could hide a man at all." He waited a beat. "I will admit you are skilled. I did not see you for some time."
For a long moment, nothing answered him but the wind.
Then a figure detached itself from the grey rock above — a man in heavy furs, moving down the slope with the sure, economical steps of someone who had walked this ground his whole life.
"I am not a threat," Benjamin went on, hands loose and visible at his sides. "I have come looking for something people in the town below insist does not exist. I am a friend, whatever that is worth to you at present."
The man studied him a long moment before he spoke. "You are English."
"I am. Benjamin Russell."
"étienne."
"You seem to know this mountain well. Is there somewhere to shelter from the snow?"
étienne looked him over once more, weighing something, then turned without answering directly. "There is a cave. Follow me."
The cave was shallow but dry, and étienne built a small fire with the efficient, unhurried motions of a man who had done it a thousand times before. They sat across from each other in its light, the storm muffled to a low hush beyond the entrance.
"Very few travel this far up the mountain," étienne said finally. "What is it you are seeking?"
"A village. Hidden somewhere in these peaks." Benjamin held his gaze steadily. "The one I believe you come from."
Something sharpened in étienne's expression. "And why would you wish to find such a place, if it existed at all?"
"It does exist. I have met two of your people before, some years ago." Benjamin did not look away. "I was a captain in the British Army. We were sent here on a covert operation — to arrest a French general wanted for war crimes."
étienne went very still. Then, in one fast, fluid motion, a knife was in his hand.
"Then you are dangerous."
Benjamin drew his own blade in answer, and for a long moment the two of them simply held their ground, blades level, neither one closing the distance.
"I have no wish to harm you," Benjamin said.
"Then why," étienne said, "are there six men, two days behind you, armed and following your trail? Do you imagine I have not seen them?" His jaw tightened. "You lead danger to this mountain."
Something in Benjamin's face eased, oddly, into something like grim amusement. "So they have made it that far already." He shook his head slowly. "They follow me for revenge, étienne. Not for you, or your village, or anything you protect. For me."
"I do not care whose revenge it is." étienne's knife did not lower. "If you wish to live, you will turn back down this mountain and never return to it."
Benjamin looked down at the blade in his own hand.
Then he threw it aside, into the snow beyond the fire's light, and knelt.
"I cannot turn back," he said. "I made a promise, and I intend to keep it." He held étienne's eyes, steady and unarmed. "I surrender. I am your prisoner, if that is what it takes. Only — can you get me to your village without those men following the both of us there?"
étienne stared at him, plainly caught off guard.
"Give me your hands," he said finally.
Benjamin held them out, and étienne bound them, quick and practiced.
"I cannot climb with my hands tied," Benjamin said.
"You will not need to. You are closer than you believe — closer than either of us has any right to expect, given how you came to be found at all.
" étienne rose, pulling Benjamin up by the arm.
"As for the men following you." étienne pulled him up by the arm.
"Since it is you they are tracking, we will see they follow something else instead.
Footprints going the wrong way, deep enough into the wrong pass"
"They will not take it."
étienne stopped.
"They have followed me across a country and a sea and four days of this mountain," Benjamin said.
"A man who has come that far does not turn down a false trail because it is convenient.
He checks it. He sends one man up it and holds the rest, and when it comes to nothing he goes back to the last true print and starts again, and he has lost half a day and learned that somebody is helping me.
" He held étienne's eyes. "Which is worse for you than if he had simply kept walking. "
"Then what would you have me do?"
"Show me the narrowest ground between here and your village."
étienne did not answer at once.
"There is one place," he said. "An hour above us. The pass closes to the width of two men and the rock stands high on both sides." His mouth thinned. "And there is a stand of pine at the top of it that has held that slope since before my grandfather."
"How many trees?"
"You are not going to cut my trees, Englishman."
"One tree."