Henry grinned, for he had often used grand words and phrases like by gad, gadzooks and sink me, to imitate who Henry thought was the famous, aristocratic Scarlet Pimpernel.
Hal nudged Armande, who took it rather gracelessly, noticing it had some initials sown into the corner: PS. Gracelessly, until Armande suddenly realised that such a fine handkerchief might make him a worthy leader of the Pimpernels.
Skanks reached into his other pocket now and chucked something to Spike, who caught the bag of shillings that the highwayman had taken from Francis.
Then Jack Skanks produced a long metal object, that he handed straight to Francis.
“Proper equipment, lad,” he cried, “A little telescope, to ‘elp you keep your eye in, for stargazing, and watching for dangerous spies too, but avoiding the sight of blood. Pinched it off a navy captain, just near Dover. Well, his pretty wife really.”
Skanks winked and Francis was delighted with the thing, as Henry looked a little jealous, until Skanks slipped his hand into his belt, pulled out one of his own pistols and pointed it in Henry’s face. At Hal’s look of utter horror, Jack Skanks laughed again.
“It aint loaded, lad. Bullets can go off in all sorts of unlucky ways, so I only keeps one loaded, as a last resort. The rest’s just show. Like you’ll all need now. Good disguises.”
Skanks flipped it over, and offered Henry the brass handle.
Hal grinned foolishly, as he took it, but now Skanks looked admiringly up at Skipper, whose nose was still sore and red with cold, and streaming badly.
“An’ you don’t need nothing, Skip,” said Skanks rather fondly, “’cept to show all that courage you’s got in bucket loads.”
Skipper Holmwood, feeling left out before, gave a delighted if toothless grin and felt like a Lord on top of the carriage.
“There,” said Jack Skanks, popping his hat on Francis Simpkins’s head too, although extracting the feather and sticking it behind his ear, “And remember this, no matter how you disguise yerselves, lads, never forget who you really are. It’s what’s inside that really counts.”
The boys and Spike looked at each other sharply and Henry felt rather strange. Who exactly was he, he suddenly wondered again.
“Wish me well then,” cried Skanks though, “and tomorrow’ll see my pockets bulging. Or if they ever cathes me I’ll soon be…”
Spike pulled a finger across her throat, and with another huge laugh, Skanks slapped his horse Betsy and galloped off.
“The Open Road,” he roared, as the wind caught his hair. “The sport of the open road.”
“Well,” whispered Hal, as they saw the strange adult vanishing into the sunny distance, “that must be the only thief in England who gives things back again.”
The Pimples all grinned, with a feeling of desperate relief too, yet rather sad to see the funny adult go, all except for Count Armande.
“Still a common thief though,” the Count grunted, “and a dangerous Revolutionary too.”
Henry touched the Patent Revolutionary Time Piece at his neck.
“But these aren’t ordinary times, Count,” suggested Francis, in his three cornered hat, and holding his new telescope proudly. “And now we’ve got some real equipment. Loads of it. Just like magic.”
“Told you so,” said Spike, with a grin.
“Hand that over then, Spike,” said Henry though, holding out his hand for the bag of coin.
“Won’t,” answered Nell, “or only if you promise not to take me back again.”
Her brother frowned at her.
“We can’t go back now, you little idiot, it would only slow us up and then we’d miss Juliette for certain.”
Spike grinned delightedly and handed over the coins.
“But H,” she said, looking longingly at his birthday gift, “Can’t I wear that now, please, as the Keeper of the Sacred Time…”
“No, Eleanor,” snapped her brother, “The Leader wears it. And don’t ever try to trick me like that again. Understand me?”
Away the Club rattled, but not as fast as they might have wished, for now they came on the strangest thing yet: Toll gates - high walls built across the Dover Road - where rough armed men were stationed to collect money from ordinary travellers, to pay for the up keep of the road.
The tolls were collected at each stop, especially closer to the port, but although there were a few raised eyebrows at the odd little party, especially fine Count Armande, all the toll men seemed really interested in was their money.
There were so many gates that Henry Bonespair wondered if the bag would hold out, or if they would reach Dover at all. They were racing against time now.
“Oh hurry up,” he cried, as they reached yet another one, sitting beside Skipper now, up on the pillion, but at last the gates dropped away too and, near afternoon, the horse’s ears pricked up and they began to strain in their harnesses and rush on. They could smell the sea.
Wickham’s animals were filled with the adventure too, as excited as the rest of the Club, now poking their three young heads out of carriage, the two others sitting up front, their hair streaming wildly in the racing wind.
“Could almost make ‘em fly, ‘aitch,” cried Skipper, as Henry watched the way he handled the reins admiringly.
“We’ve got to be in time though, Skip,” cried Hal, clutching his watch, and making his very will urge them on, to prove himself to Juliette St Honoré, and wondering how large these agents were, or what Dr Marat looked like.
Suddenly they all spotted it: The wide blue green expanses of the sea, the great English Channel, and nestling in the lea of huge white cliffs, rising like a great whitewashed castle wall before them, the famous little port of Dover.
“Doveur,” gasped Count Armande, “I pray we’re not too late.”
“Wot you doing, F?” asked Spike though, as they drew closer still.
Francis Simpkins seemed lost in a dream, scribbling swottishly in his book, in his three cornered hat, but the boy blushed and looked a little embarrassed, although what he said almost made Spike yawn.
“Writing a story,” answered Francis Simpkins seriously, “About us, Spike. A real and reliable History.”
FIVE - A TOUCH OF BRACING SEA COURAGE
“In which the Club are too late, we meet a famous English hero to be, very possibly encounter the Scarlet Pimpernel himself, and go to a crowded Inn…”
Fear. That’s what the brave members of the Pimpernel Club sensed as soon as they reached the famous port of Dover, like some spreading darkness, as they stabled William Wickham’s coach with a busy little farriers on the edge of the port, at the cost of yet another two shillings.
The intrepid Club set off on foot around the town, quite forgetting to dress up, looking for Juliette and her Frenchie abductors, their ears filled with the sounds of the waves and the mournful screeching of hungry gulls.
Spike was walking at Skipper’s side, it made her feel much safer, and Henry had shouldered the dressing up bag, while Count Armande carried his little tapestry valise rather carefully, thinking Horace Holmwood should carry it for him instead.
Everywhere they saw Redcoats at street corners, or going to and from the garrison barracks, as the Pimpernels tried to look as ordinary as possible. But it wasn’t just soldiers, alert for invasion and foreign spies, who seemed to have such a wary and vigilant look, it was all the good Dover citizens too.
Where once they had promenaded Dover’s happy water fronts and peaceful alleys, like cheerful picnickers taking the sea air, now they caste each other menaced and menacing glances. Families bunched together like groups of mussels, clinging to their individual rocks and waiting for a wave to strike and wash them away.
Shoppers darted in and out of the shop fronts, like energetic prawns, snapping up the morsels they needed and scooting back to their holes in the long reef of Dovers’ humble terraced houses, before some bigger, more toothsome fish appeared to gobble them up.
The good people of Dover were truly ter
rified of the looming Terror across the sea. Children would wake in the night, hearing above the shifting water, the slicing snap of Madame Guillotine, seeing a phalanx of little heads roll into a shop display of a thousand blood red wicker baskets.
Mothers would hold their frightened children, among their nightmares, women their men, lovers their sweethearts, and wonder what storm was about to break over them all.
Not that they were no revolutionary voices in England too, but now every Englishman, and most Scots and Welshman too, knew that the Revolution over that thin stretch of water dividing two great countries was entering a new and implacable phase, and with it came the horrible realities of War. It was time indeed to take sides and fight for home.
The little Club, talking sides to rescue Juliet St Honoré, had been walking around Dover for two weary hours. Twilight was coming in, with no sign of Juliette or espion, at all, when Armande pulled up sharp.
The Count was pointing across the street, at a black carriage, stabled in a dingy courtyard.
“La,” he cried angrily, putting down his valise, “Look, Bonespair. The filthy coach that they took Juliette in. I’m sure.”
Armande was suddenly looking rather strangely at the others, as if this first piece of excellent detective work gave him a sudden new standing in the Club.
Henry led the Pimpernels straight across the cobbles, towards a scrawny figure sitting on a stool, smoking a long Meerschaum pipe, talking to another rough looking man.
The gang stopped nearby and when the pipe smoker glanced at them, Spike saw that his right eye was as milky as a poached egg. He stank of tobacco and raw fish too, which they could smell even at this distance.
“Frenchies,” they heard him hiss to the other man, “But with proper papers. A merchant, his driver and daughter. Picked her up from London, they said, though she seemed none too pleased to be going ‘ome. No wonder. They say Old Nick’s let loose across the Channel now.”
“Av’ a care, Bob,” said the other, and for a second Spike thought he was talking Avagum, “They’ve seen spies on the road.”
“’eer, leave it out,” cried the first man, his face crumpling like a rotten lemon, “Any rate, they’ll be gone with the turning tide. Sailing on L’Esperance, down there. I can still see her mast. Know that damned Frenchie ship anywhere.”
The smoker was just wandering what the strange children wanted, but the Pimpernels were suddenly hurtling away again, down those cobbled streets, racing furiously after their quarry, and wondering if their perilous journey had all be in vain.
“Hurry up, all of you,” cried Hal bitterly. “On the Club’s honour.”
Just fifteen minutes later the Pimpernel Club stood in the bracing sea wind, on the Dover harbour side, staring out open mouthed, as a two masted ship, L’Esperance, glided out across the flat English Channel. It had sailed with the turning tide.
Francis was holding Skank’s telescope, blinking stupidly, because it seemed to him as if the boat was already a thousand miles away, and through the viewer was now just a tiny pinprick on the distant horizon.
“Wrong way round, you ninnee,” said Spike, almost kicking him.
Francis blushed, since he thought himself so scientific, and turned it, but Count Armande grabbed the thing and trained it to his own eye, the right way round, this time.
“L’Esperance,” he cried bitterly, “And my sister. They’ve gone, ‘enri.”
As the Club passed the little scope between them, they could see two men on deck, dressed in black, and between them, peering back longingly towards Dover, over the gunnels of the ship, stood a terrified young French woman, her blonde hair ruffled mournfully in the wind. Juliette St Honoré was already on her way to France.
“Smithereens,” cried Henry, clenching his watch, “We’ve failed already.”
The poor Pimpernel Club stood helplessly on the quayside, feeling terrible now, although the sight of the open sea suddenly gave them the most enormous sense of thwarted freedom and adventure.
“Now what, Hal?” shrugged Spike at last, rather hopefully too, “Home, to be the Catchers again?”
Count Armande shook his head, wondering what he would tell his mother, the old Countess, and Francis Simpkins thought of his parents, with some considerable relief too, when they heard a high pitched piping, like a whistle, and saw a group of English sailors marching straight towards them along the harbour side.
As the sailors neared, they found themselves pushed backwards, because they were forming into lines now. One of them was blowing on a whistle, making those strange high-pitched noises on the wind.
The Pimpernel Club felt as if they had been co-opted into a parade, because they spotted a fine, tall figure striding along the quay in a white wig, a blue Navy dress coat, britches and white stockings, marching boldly towards them, followed by two young Midshipmen, in hats just like Francis’s.
The tall man leading had a very special air about him and the faces around them, among the ordinary, dirty sailory, were beaming and nodding approvingly.
“Oi lads,” cried one, “Let’s ‘eer it loud for the cap’ain then. Hip Hip...”
There was a great shout of ‘Hooray’ and many of the good citizens of Dover stopped to watch the spectacle too.
“With a crew like you, lads,” cried the Captain, “and a ship like the Aggy, England has nothing to fear. Nothin’ more thrillin’ and freein’ than a war, eh? I don’t know what the Frenchies think of you, but you scare the wits out of me. Hearts of oak, eh lads?””
The Captain was gazing out to sea and Henry, who had felt his heart swell at all this brave talk, realised he was looking at a ship that they hadn’t noticed before, sliding gracefully into the port, along the Channel, from the East.
It was a British Man-O-War, as Francis Simpkins wanted to note in his little book, a real British warship, it’s great white sails billowing in the stiff breeze.
Hal and Francis guessed it must be the Aggy, the HMS Agamemnon: His Majesty’s Ship.
“We sail tomorrow, lads,” cried the Captain, smiling, especially at his young midshipmen, not much older than the leader of the Club, “the tide swell has slowed the boats, but we’ll be at the Frenchies soon enough. I promise it. And victory.”
Suddenly Henry Bonespair’s mind was launching out over the water and he wanted to stand on deck, serving his King, and turn the boat’s guns, 64 poking from the great gun holes along the Agamemnon’s sides, straight at the revolutionary L’Esperance.
The Captain turned now, winked straight at little Spike, then strode on, as his loyal sailors swarmed after him, leaving the Pimples to themselves again. Except for the sailor who had blown the whistle, staring at Eleanor Bonespair as if she had just been anointed.
“What are you looking at, ninnee?” said Eleanor crossly. She hated being stared at.
“You, lad,” the ruffian grunted, taking a pinch of snuff from a battered old tin, “Touched by the gaze of Lucky Nell himsel’. Nell winked at ye, ye little powder monkey.”
“Lucky Nell?” said Henry though, looking confused and glancing at his sister.
“But don’t ye know who that was?” cried the sailor, marching off too, “Cap’ain Horatio Nelson, himself. Our best an’ bravest. Luckiest too, Lucky Nelson.”
Nellie beamed, despite herself.
They were left alone, but Captain Nelson’s appearance had cheered and thrilled Henry, and even Francis, who had heard of Nelson’s daring naval exploits in the newspapers. Henry thought of his own leadership of the Club and as he realised he had just failed in their first adventure, determined to be just like Nelson in future.
Count Armande was still gazing bitterly after L’Esperance though.
“What now?” gulped Francis, noticing the strange, mad gleam in Henry’s Bonespair’s eyes, which made him feel strangely sick. That voice was in Hal’s head again though, about knowing your limitations, Robert Penhaligon’s voice, but Henry suddenly swung round to face the others.
?
??The Club go straight to Revolutionary Paris, of course,” said Henry.
Count Armande St Honoré looked at Hal in as much amazement as the others, except perhaps silent Skipper, who was standing a little behind them.
“Qu’est que vous avez dites, Bonespair?” Armande whispered, “I mean, ‘enri. What?”
“We go to Paris, Count,” answered Hal more quietly, feeling the salt wind fresh on his cheeks and his heart thundering again, but trying to stand as tall as Captain Nelson, although his legs were shaking, as he gazed at the open sea.
“Oh, you’ve gone mad,” said little Spike, “that’s just daft, H.”
“Spike’s right, Hal,” whispered Francis, staring fearfully out across the threatening English Channel, “there’s a war starting, and you can’t just walk into enemy territory, Henry. That just stands to reason.”
“Oh, I know that, ninnee,” said Hal, slipping his hand into his pockets and pulling out some rather crumpled papers, “So the Club need these.”
“The letters of passage,” gulped Francis Simpkins, his heart plummeting.
“And the Itinerary, F,” said Henry, “It’s all mapped out, to Paris and back again. We’ve a room here in Dover too, and passage on the Spirit of Endeavour, after that. We’ve got money too, a little, and I’m not afraid of boats.”
“But en France, Monsieur?” asked Armande, a little sarcastically and Hal frowned deeply. Something inside him was fighting himself now.
“Er, we go straight to my grandmother’s, Count,” he answered, “Madame Geraldine De Bonespair, in the Rue Beaulieu. It’s written on the itinerary too.”
Armande blinked at him. Henry Bonespair was not joking at all.
“Rue Beaulieu? By the old watchtower,” the French boy muttered, wondering what it was really like in Paris now, “just near the Temple prison. I used to play there as a boy.”
Spike raised an eyebrow. Armande was still a boy to Nellie Bonespair, and a very silly one too, with all his fear of dirt and his fancy ways.
“There then, Count,” said Hal, improvising wildly now, “We, er, tell Grandma what’s happened and ask for her help. She’s summoned us to Paris anyhow, or Spike and me.”