King, Ship and Sword by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-05-29T19:00:11+00:00

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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

They got beyond Montdidier by farm roads as the unhappy Fleury family, then the Plumbs altered their disguises to those of a pair of old crones, Sir Pulteney doing a remarkable imitation of a woman for a whole day, whilst Alan and Caroline hid in the waggon bed under an even larger pile of pilfered straw. In that guise they crossed the river Somme, then let the Lewries emerge for another set of costumes and aliases. The way Sir Pulteney and Lady Imogene preened, giggled, and congratulated each other really began to cut raw with Lewrie.

Sir Pulteney became M'sieur André Guyot, a garrulous, somewhat simple and grey-haired "Merry Andrew" with but a muted version of his inane donkey-bray laugh, no longer in need of a cane.

Himself t'the bone, and he don't have t'act, Lewrie thought of that persona. Might we mention that Lewrie by this time was becoming a touch surly?

Lady Imogene became Madame Hortense Guyot, streaking her raven hair with touches of grey to play an elegant beauty, wed to an older, well-to-do man, and a silly goose herself, with fond toleration of her husband's foibles.

"Oh, such a clever ploy, m'dear!" Lady Imogene gushed as they studied themselves in a hand mirror. "And so distinguished-looking!" Be pullin' rabbits out o' his hat next, Lewrie told himself.

Now they were in Artois and Picardy, so close to the border of the former Austrian Netherlands and the dead Holy Roman Empire (which after 1815 would become Belgium) Sir Pulteney thought it made sense for the Lewries to portray the Guyots' manservant and maid, Flemings or Walloons, half-German really, hired from cross the border years before. Lewrie became a flaxen blond in neat but worn brown woolen ditto; Caroline became a coppery redhead with her face subtley re-done to pinky-raw cheeks and chin. Again, their poor French could be explained by their supposed origins, and in Flanders, Ricardy, and in Artois, no one gave a tinker's dam or the slightest bit of notice to crude Flemish or Walloon folk—as bad as so many Germans to them!

Sir Pulteney allowed his goose-brained self to be cheated most sinfully at Albert, a small town on the road to Arras and Lille, on a solo trip, then returned to join them in a wood lot short of the town at the reins of a shabby canvas-topped cabriolet with a younger and fresher two-horse team, wishing to make a grand entrance in Lille, he told them as they re-loaded the remaining trunks and valises, which by then had been reduced to but one valise each, and one trunk that held the last disguises Sir Pulteney decided would be apt when they got to the coast.

Albert to Arras, the famed woolen industry town. But instead of going through it and proceeding on to Lille, as Sir Pulteney had told the cabriolets owner, they turned off the main road once more and resorted to back-roads and farm lanes 'til striking a major highway near Béthune. There, they

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