He raised his head at that and gave her a wan smile which only added to her fears.

'Something has happened to Jason?' she said, anguish suddenly catching at her throat. They have—'

'No, no! He is alive. But he is hurt, Marianne, hurt badly.'

'Hurt? How? Why?'

Then Arcadius told them what had happened. When they halted at Pontorson, one of those on Jason's chain, a young lad of eighteen, had the ague and was calling for water to slake his raging thirst. One of the guards had amused himself by emptying a jug of water over the boy's head and then kicking him in the ribs until he lay still. This had put Jason in a rage. He had sprung at the man and knocked him down. Having done so, he had then knelt on his chest and done his best to choke the life out of him. The guard's fellows had come hurrying to the rescue with their whips and one of the officers had drawn his sword.

'He was wounded in the chest,' Jolival went on. 'The brutes would have killed him but for one of the other convicts, a man called Vidocq, who encouraged the rest to gather round him and protect him. Even so, the remainder of the journey was a nightmare…'

'But – wasn't he looked after?'

Jolival shook his head. 'His comrades did their best when the chain stopped, but they were made to walk two stages on foot as punishment. I thought he would not reach here alive.'

'It's horrible!' Marianne said tonelessly. She sat back on her heels, her whole attitude one of despair, and stared unseeingly at the familiar room. Instead, she saw a bleak road, swept by wind and rain, and a wounded man dragging himself along in chains, kept on his feet by other vague, human figures as exhausted as himself.

'They will kill him,' she said. 'He will never survive. Have these poor wretches even a hospital?'

It was Gracchus who answered:

'There is one in the bagne. But I thought the chain was supposed to have a medical inspection at Pont-a-Lézen before they even got here?'

'The guards refused to leave him there. It's too easy to escape from the quarantine camp. And the man he attacked was against it, saying he'd have sufficient treatment in the prison to make him able to endure the punishment that was coming to him. That man's nothing but a brute beast. He'll not be satisfied until he has his pound of flesh.'

'Punishment? What punishment?'

'A flogging first, and then the cells, where he may remain for several months, if he survives the flogging! And there's no escaping from there.'

The waiting, buoyed up by the very real hopes which Marianne had brought with her from St Malo, had been a time of comparative peace compared with the horror which now took hold of her. She knew now that Jason was caught in the jaws of a relentless and awful machine from which it would be terribly difficult to free him and which might yet destroy him. In his present state, escape was unthinkable and if he recovered it would only be to fall into a still worse plight.

While she sat lost in these dismal meditations, Gracchus, swearing fluently, had taken up the sailor's pea jacket which he had bought the better to mingle unnoticed with the inhabitants of the great port and was putting it on again. Then, pulling his brown woollen cap down over his ears, he made swiftly for the door.

He paused at the sound of Marianne's voice.

'Where are you going at this time of night?'

'To Keravel. There's a wine-shop by the prison gates where the guards go to drink. I'm known there now and I've struck up an acquaintance with a Sergeant La Violette who's a great one for the bottle. A tot of rum'll be enough to make him tell me anything I want to know – and what I want to know is what's become of Monsieur Jason.'

A light came into Jolival's tired eyes at these words.

'He sounds a useful man to know. Well done. You go alone for tonight, but tomorrow I'll come and assist in the saturation of your sergeant.'

When Gracchus returned, two hours later, Marianne and Jolival were still downstairs, he smoking by the fire in silence, she, incapable of sitting still, trying to calm her fidgets by putting away the crockery. The news which Sergeant La Violette had breathed out, along with the fumes of his rum, confirmed that brought by Jolival in all respects, but with one slightly more encouraging addition. One of the prisoners had been brought in wounded and sent at once to the prison hospital. It was his good fortune that the surgeon in charge of the medical arrangements in the prison was still there at the time the chain arrived. A former escapee being brought back to complete his sentence had managed to inform him and he had examined the injured prisoner at once.

'François Vidocq again,' was Marianne's thought. But the thought of that odd, insouciant individual who had so annoyed her in La Force, now evoked nothing but gratitude. She could almost have remembered him in her prayers, knowing that it was thanks to him that Jason was alive at that moment. But for how long? The enmity of the man he had knocked down was all about him, watching its opportunity, and that thought, in the days ahead, was to breed in Marianne's heart a vague, but ever-present fear.

To an outside observer, those days would have appeared calm and unvaried to the point of monotony, punctuated only by the church bells and the castle gun. The inhabitants of the little house lived a quiet, ordered life, attending to their small domestic affairs or walking out, uncle and niece together strolling sedately arm-in-arm through the streets of the town or along the esplanade by the castle, visiting the harbour and the historic old quarters. The young servant, when he was off duty, loafed about doing nothing in particular, as was to be expected of a lad of his age. He would spend hours on the quays by the Penfeld watching the prisoners loading cases of shot and grenades aboard the warships, coiling the new-made ropes as they emerged from the hands of their comrades, working on vessels undergoing repairs and stacking the great baulks of freshly cut timber, still redolent of their native forests, for use in the shipyards. Yet there was another side to these innocent wanderings, which was to gather the greatest possible amount of information and, most important of all, to watch for the arrival of the Saint-Guénolé.

The lugger was taking an inexplicably long time. According to Jolival's calculations, it should have been sighted at least a week before and Marianne found the delay both fretting and alarming. The sea had been so rough of late that who could say whether the little craft would manage to get safely through the Fromveur channel, with its perilous reputation, round the Promontoire de St Mathieu and make the little harbour of Le Conquet without being driven on to the rocks? Even the fishermen mostly stayed at home and they were saying on the quays and in the taverns that no news had come through from the offshore islands for a fortnight or more. As so often in the winter months, Molène and Ushant were cut off from the mainland by the pounding seas.

Once the doors and shutters were safely closed, however, the occupants of the house devoted themselves to less innocent occupations. Jolival spent hours painstakingly cutting in half the big bronze sous, in size and thickness more than adequate for the purpose, and just as carefully putting them together again, but with gold coins concealed inside, money being an indispensable tool for the convict. He had also made a copy of the brass numberplate worn by every convict on his cap, with, on it, Jason's number-learned from Sergeant La Violette – only this time in steel with minuscule saw teeth which would enable it to saw through chains. Meanwhile, Marianne had been learning to bake bread and two large loaves had already been dispatched to the bagne, again through the good offices of La Violette. Inside each one was a piece of ordinary civilian clothing.

After dark, Jolival and Gracchus would slip out of the house and make their way down to Keravel, to the tavern known as 'The Girl from Jamaica' where they were looked on by now as regular customers. Nor was the news they brought back unencouraging. The injured man was recovering, slowly but surely. His youth and strong constitution had won. The danger of infection was past. Arcadius and the surgeon of the prison were, in fact, agreed on the beneficial effects of sea air on healing wounds; but still Marianne was unable to think without a shudder of the narrow pallet of seaweed and the chains which held the body of the man she loved, for the convicts were never released from their chains.

Christmas was coming and as it fell this year on a Tuesday and Friday was market day in Brest, Marianne went with Madame le Guilvinec on the Friday before, down to the rue de Siam to make the necessary purchases in preparation for the festival which was probably dearer than any other to Breton hearts. It would have looked suspiciously odd if the new inhabitant of Recouvrance had behaved differently from her neighbours in this.

The weather was mild but misty. The rue de Siam, always at its busiest on market days, was wrapped in a dense yellow fog, making the animation all about appear strangely subdued. The sailors' striped trousers and varnished hats, the rich, colourful costumes of the peasant girls, a different dress for every village, seemed to fade into unreality. The Leon girls, in their tall hennins with long, fringed shawls falling almost to their heels, took on the air of witches from a fairy tale, while those from Plouaré, all smothered in red and gold embroidery, were like so many figures of the Virgin, stepped down from their niches in the church. Everyone, even the old people in their sombre blacks, was transformed into a fantastic being from another world, while the men, with their embroidered waistcoats, wide, pleated trousers and little round hats were as colourful and gay as any.