Lempriere's Dictionary (87 page)

‘But it
was
different,’ said Jaques. ‘Perhaps the King knew our plans were more advanced than even our opponents allowed, perhaps our trade was more valuable than we knew ourselves. Whatever the reasons, the royal army grew and grew until by September of that year there must have been twenty thousand troops camped around us. Still we looked out from the walls untroubled. With our own and the English fleets we held the seas to the west and supplies were ferried in with ease. Naturally there were batteries on the points of the outer harbour, but their fire was inaccurate, the mouth too wide, our ships too fast. Then, midway through October, we saw a strange construction begin to take shape. Day by day, little by little, the points of the headlands seemed to be extending further across the mouth of the harbour.’

‘Richelieu was building a mole,’ said Casterleigh. ‘To close off the harbour.’

‘A kind of rampart,’ Vaucanson expanded. ‘Two rough jetties made from piles and rocks. The engineer was Metézeau. I knew his work, but I could not see how it might succeed. A storm, even a strong tide, these would have washed it all away. But they sank ships filled with stones to either side and filled the space with boulders. They left a gap in the middle for the force of the sea to expend itself. If this table were the harbour, the space in which you stand now was eventually no more than inches across. Even then we felt it would never withstand the winter storms. They placed a new battery on Pointe de Coureille and began to harass our ships. The mole was still hardly advanced though and the last months of that year held few terrors for any of us.’

‘To the east,’ said Jaques, ‘the King’s lines were impregnable. There was nothing to be had by land. The sea had always provided for us and now it was our lifeline. We began to understand why, with only twenty-five
thousand souls in the city, there had been no great assaults on our walls. They meant to starve us out. That was the purpose behind the mole.’

‘We petitioned for safe conduct for our wives and children, but the King would not hear of it,’ said Casterleigh. ‘We came altogether, or not at all.’

‘Buckingham sailed for England in November,’ Jaques spoke again. ‘He left his promise to return and Saint Martin in the hands of the King’s men.’

‘And did he return?’ asked Lemprière.

‘He was to meet his end at the hands of an assassin later that year, but the English needed the Rochelais if they wished their ships to pass unhindered along the western coast of France. They understood what Richelieu wanted well enough and we knew they would return. When they did we imagined Richelieu’s mole and the King’s fleet would be swept away for flotsam. But then, a few days into the new year, a huge storm blew up from the south. It raged all night and in the morning we looked out over the harbour and for the first time we began to worry.’

‘Why? What had changed?’

‘Nothing, nothing at all. We thought perhaps it was a freak, a piece of the Cardinal’s luck, but the mole was still there. It was untouched when we expected every trace of it to lie five fathoms down. We knew then that the city might fall and that was when we sent François to England.’ Vaucanson had been staring at Jaques during this recital. Now he turned to Lemprière.

‘If the mole could withstand the storm, it might withstand the fleet. We needed to know what the English planned and plan accordingly ourselves. We needed to know if and when to run. That is why we sent François.’

‘He left on the last day of January under cover of night in a dinghy.’ Jaques took up the story from Vaucanson. ‘His scheme was to rendezvous with some Hollanders coming up the coast with salt. But he was sighted passing through the mole. We watched the musket-fire from the walls. We could do nothing and did not know if he lived or died.’

‘He lived though,’ said Lemprière.

‘Oh yes, he lived,’ Casterleigh answered.

Jaques glanced across at him and cleared his throat. ‘We were left inside the walls. No boat larger than a pinnace made it past the mole after that. They had sunk ships to block the opening and their masts rose above the surface like a palisade. We fired on the mole from the walls but to little effect. We were trapped and we knew it.

Lemprière looked in the shadows for the leader who had remained silent throughout. The others had grown animated as the events of the siege were relived, survived a second time. But the shadows were still, the human pillars behind him were still. Even Le Mara seemed more animated and Le Mara had not uttered a word.

‘We were eight then,’ Jaques went on. ‘We waited for word from
François, from a nuncio who might have been dead or alive. The city waited too, cut off now by land and sea. We already knew the means of our own escape should it become necessary, but it was hazardous. There were factors beyond our control….’

Lemprière broke in. ‘How could you escape? If you were cut off as you claim….’

‘Wait, for there is more before that. The Rochelais began to realise that they might lose. The city began to change. A series of fires swept through the merchants’ quarter, started by cannon-fire we thought. They were the work of incendiaries, arsonists hidden in our midst. Everything that would burn - straw, hay, faggots, powder from the magazines - was carried to the citadel and stored in the cellars there. Soldiers were seized trying to cross the lines carrying passports signed by Richelieu himself. The traitors we uncovered swung a dozen at a time from gibbets in the square. We racked them and they told us names. We racked the names and they told us others. False witness joined our list of fears. Towards the end of January a sickness spread through the city causing jaws to blacken and gums to bleed. It was scurvy. Food became scarce. We began to kill the horses, then the asses and mules, cats and dogs, rats and mice at the last. Before then there would be cannibalism in the poorest quarters. Anything that lived was killed. Anything that could be swallowed was seized upon for food: ox hides, leather scabbards and boots boiled in tallow, even cinnamon and liquorice from the apothecaries. We made a kind of bread from straw and sugar, or wood pounded in mortars, plaster, earth, even dung. We hardly had the strength to cheer when May brought Denbigh’s expedition off the coast with fifty ships. But the batteries mounted on the mole fought him off and our own fireships drifted harmlessly into the banks. Still there was no word from François. By the end of May the silos were empty and people took to gathering cockles along the coast under the enemies’ guns or foraging for purslane between the walls and the King’s lines. Inside the city, the old and the very young began to die.’

Juliette’s face was perfectly still, almost inhuman in the candle light. The energies of the Cabbala were beginning to ebb. Lemprière listened as Jaques conjured images from the last months of the siege: hollow faces on consumptive bodies, bodies like anatomies, the smell of the unburied dead, flat skies, the dull
crump
of the cannon which went unanswered though there was powder in plenty for the soldiers could no longer traverse their own guns, skins shining with a mockery of blooming health. So few children. The quiet streets. Sentries posted for the night halved in number by daybreak. The great bell silent. No-one had the strength to toll it by then. The outer walls were already cold and people moved like ghosts towards the centre of the city. Rumour and hearsay brought them by the
thousand to the iron-banded doors of the citadel. The city was dying, they knew this, but the manner of its death was still unknown. There were stories, intimations of the revenge to be exacted by their King. These lead them through the drab streets and into the citadel where the doors are shut and barred behind them. High arched windows look down on the mass of bodies. They have nothing to lose, so the story goes. Nothing at all.

‘By October we were dying in our hundreds. Deputations were shuttling back and forth between Guiton and Richelieu, trying to arrange terms. Bras de Fer was talking of a suicidal charge for the lines. There were less than eight thousand of us left from a city of twenty-five. In the last week of the month François’ message reached us, coded in a despatch addressed to Guiton, the mayor. We had arranged it before he left: every seventh letter was taken and added to the next, then every ninth from that. Seven and nine were François’ favourite numbers. We pored over the report, which promised new expeditions from England, offered intelligence of Richelieu’s clemency and urged us all to hold the city for another month. But as the real message emerged letter by letter, we knew these distant encouragements for lies. François’ message to us read:
There is no expedition. No quarter will be given. Save yourselves
. The city was to be sacked, its walls razed. Our deputations were only putting off the hour. There were no terms for we had nothing to offer and everyone in the city suspected as much. They had nothing to lose. Nothing at all. So we planned our escape.’ Lemprière looked down at Jaques, but Jaques would not meet his eye. Vaucanson was watching the other man too.

‘Why wait?’ he asked. ‘Why not before?’

‘Our lives were there.’ Jaques would look at him now. The shadows stirred in some kind of affirmation. ‘Everything we had built and worked for was in Rochelle, its ships, walls, our houses … We knew we would lose all that. But the main hoard, the wealth from the Company, all of it cached and hidden over twenty-five years, that we thought might still be saved, until François’ message. We had waited too long and now we had to run for our lives.’ Jaques stopped again and Lemprière saw the leader shift in the darkness. Vaucanson spoke.

‘There was a passage. Land and sea were denied us. There were only two ways out of Rochelle: by the air or through the earth. Beneath the citadel there was a kind of cavern, a tunnel which ran from the cellars under the foundations of the city to a subterranean lake. It was our own discovery, a vast lagoon and at its centre a tiny island which we used as our cache. The lake spread underground, north for two miles or more and on its far side a strip of gravel formed a kind of shore. A second tunnel led from that secret shore to the known coast of Point du Plombe.’

‘Where you unloaded your cargoes….’

‘We never meant to use it as the means of our escape but now our need was pressing. This would be our route and it would have been straightforward but for the Royal Camp.’

‘Up and down the coast for miles. Vast!’ Boffe unfurled his arms.

‘We knew there was a field hospital nearby and perhaps a barracks. We might emerge face to face with the King’s Dragoons, or they might have found the tunnel and the lake….’

‘And the gold.’

‘That was as good as lost in any case. We could not take it with us. Above all we needed a diversion, so we passed on François’ message to the survivors. Rumour of the impending massacre ran through the city like…. Almost as if people wanted to believe it. We convened a meeting in the citadel on the night of the thirtieth. They came in their thousands. Men, women, our own wives and children. We barred the doors….’ Jaques’ voice had dropped. ‘We believed François, we believed Rochelle and everyone in it was doomed.’ He stopped, as though some central obstacle had been reached and looked about him at the other members of the Cabbala. No-one spoke.

‘So you escaped, through the passage under the citadel….’

‘Yes!’ Jaques spoke quickly. ‘We escaped that night. Through the tunnel, over the lake in a row-boat, all eight of us sick with hunger. It took so long. It was almost dawn when we emerged at Point du Plombe. The Royal Camp was in chaos, strings of horses loose, soldiers running this way and that, leaderless brigades arguing and splitting into platoons, a happy rabble all cheering and pointing south to Rochelle. They would not have noticed if we had opened fire on them. We watched with them. A thick column of smoke stood in the dawn sky over the city, rising out of the citadel. Smoke and flames were pouring out of the windows. We watched in silence and we saw them begin to jump. Human fireballs plummeting out of sight. It went on for almost an hour. You could see quite clearly even from that distance. It was like a display of fireworks, but soundless of course. Every time a body fell the troops around us would cheer. They were moving in. They knew the city was finished. Then suddenly they fell silent….’

‘That is none of his concern.’ Casterleigh’s voice broke in harshly. Boffe looked anxiously from Jaques to the other. Jaques ignored the outburst.

‘They fell silent,’ he repeated, ‘and we looked back. We saw a fireball tumbling down from the window, a burning figure smaller than the others. Perhaps a child. Then we saw it dip and rise. It fell again, towards the sea this time and the sea water doused its fire.’

‘An illusion, a trick of the light,’ growled Casterleigh.

‘It rose again, a black point speeding away until it was no bigger than a gull, a fly, and then nothing at all.’

‘I know of it already,’ Lemprière said. ‘It was the Sprite, the flying man.’

‘Smaller than a man,’ Jaques murmured to himself, ‘as I saw it.’ The others shifted uneasily. ‘Afterwards, they would say its face was charred and it was winged, like an angel.’

‘A dark angel,’ said Lemprière. Jaques seemed to recover himself.

‘It was a survivor, like ourselves,’ he said. ‘Every other soul in the citadel either jumped or was consumed by the flames. Again he seemed to reach the same obstacle and came to a halt.

‘François had been … mistaken,’ he spoke carefully. ‘The city was not sacked. It was true no expedition was planned, he was right about that. But Rochelle was never going to be sacked. Neither Richelieu nor his King had any intention of reducing it to rubble. But we believed otherwise, you see? Our own wives and children, hundreds, thousands of others…. We believed it would happen in any case, that they had nothing to lose. The citadel, then the whole city. And if the Royal Army believed us dead too, why should they hunt for us? Why should we die too? We thought the Rochelais were as good as dead already.’

The realisation began to sink in. Lemprière watched Jaques stare at his own clasped hands, or the table.

‘You gathered the Rochelais in the citadel,’ he spoke deliberately. ‘You barred the doors. You escaped and you left them behind you. You emerged at Pointe du Plomb and you looked back and saw them jumping from the windows, a column of smoke rising.’ Jaques nodded slowly. Lemprière went on. ‘The city was not sacked, yet the citadel and the people you gathered within it were burning. The troops were still outside the walls, yet the fires had begun.’