Marianne took a deep breath, as if she had just surfaced after swimming for a long time under water. After all these days of doubt and anxiety, Jean Ledru's quiet confidence left her feeling slightly dashed. But, goodness, what a comfort he was! She smiled.

'I'd hardly dare! You wouldn't listen to them if I had, would you?'

'No, I shouldn't,' he agreed seriously, but his eyes twinkled suddenly as he hoisted the fish basket back on to his shoulder, with the crinkling smile which, in this taciturn Breton, was a sign of extravagant mirth:

'Warn the prisoner it's for Monday night. Let him have his chain cut through by eleven o'clock. The rest is up to me. As for yourselves – watch for the boat and when you see her alongside wait until it's dark and then go aboard.'

With a final wave of his hand, the sailor passed out of the house and through the little garden then, with his basket on his shoulder, he set off with great strides in the direction of the harbour. For a little while, the sound of his whistling came floating back to them up the steep, narrow streets, the same, jaunty little tune which Marianne had heard once before, one anguished morning as she stood watching a tiny sailing boat put slowly out to sea, leaving her the captive of Morvan the Wrecker: it was the song of Surcouf's sailors:

The thirty-first of August,

With the larboard watch below,

We spied an English frigate…

Left alone, standing looking at each other across the table on which Jean had left them a few fish, Marianne and Jolival said nothing for a moment or two. Finally, Arcadius gave a shrug and went to fetch himself a cigar from the blue Delft jar. He sniffed it gently for a moment before bending and taking a light from the fire. A rich, tobacco smell filled the room, overcoming the smell of fish.

'He's right,' he said at last. 'It pays to be bold in matters like this. Anyway, we have no choice.'

'You think he will be able to do it?' Marianne asked anxiously.

'I hope so! If he can't, my dear child, nothing can save us. We shall all be hanged at the yard-arm – unless they decide to shoot us instead. There will be no quarter, you know, if we are caught? Are you afraid?'

'Afraid? The only thing I fear, Jolival, is a life without Jason. I care for nothing else, rope or a shot is all one to me.'

Arcadius drew luxuriously on his cigar and then considered the glowing tip of it intently.

'I always knew you had the makings of a great tragic heroine,' he said equably. 'Or else a great lunatic! For my own part, I've no complaints about staying alive and since we've seven saints in the house, I'll ask them kindly to make sure this exciting Christmas Eve which our ebullient captain promises us may not be our last.'

With that, Arcadius strolled out to finish his cigar in the garden while Marianne, left to herself, started unthinkingly to gut the fish.


***

December the twenty-fourth began badly. When daylight dawned belatedly, it was to reveal dense, yellow fog, thick enough to cut with a knife. Recouvrance, with its grey stone walls and isolated trees, might have been a lost world drifting in some cloudy infinite. Visibility extended no further than the tower of La Motte Tanguy. Everything else, town, port, castle and roadstead, had vanished as utterly and completely as if the hill had loosed its moorings suddenly and sailed away into the sky, like some enormous air balloon.

Marianne, who had not slept a wink all night long, stared out resentfully at the fog. Fate seemed to be taking a malicious pleasure in making things difficult for her. She was angry with fate, angry with nature, angry with herself for her own fidgets, she was even angry with the world for continuing to turn in its ordinary way while she was in such suspense. She was so nervous and complained so many times that they could never see the Salnt-Guénolé even supposing that she was able to feel her way into the river mouth, that in the end Jolival told Gracchus to go and keep watch from the rocks by the castle point on whatever shipping appeared.

This was at about noon and after that Marianne did make some effort to behave normally for the remainder of the crucial day which was to decide the whole course of her life. Even then, she could not refrain from asking the endlessly patient Jolival a hundred times over if he were quite sure that Jason had been warned to hold himself in readiness and if François Vidocq had also been alerted, as he had requested, so that he could help the American while at the same time seizing a heaven-sent opportunity to escape himself. For Marianne was quite sure that Vidocq was not the man to do anything for nothing.

Madame le Guilvinec, who was spending the festive season with her niece at Portzic, came in during the morning to make sure that her neighbour would want for nothing during her absence and also to bring the traditional yule log which was supposed to be put on the fire to burn slowly up to the time for midnight mass. This one was prettily decorated with red ribbons, golden laurel leaves and sprigs of holly, and Marianne was all the more touched by this mark of friendship because she had been careful to give no hint of her intention to leave Brest that night for the last time and had been inclined to look on the niece's invitation as a stroke of luck.

The good lady was so distressed at the thought of leaving her new friends for this, their first Christmas, that she came back two or three times to ask them if they would not rather she stayed, or would like to come with her to her family. However, in the face of their firm, though smiling refusal, she eventually brought herself, with many expressions of regret, to say good-bye, although not without innumerable injunctions to Marianne regarding local customs: the welcome to be given to the youthful carol singers, not to forget to say a prayer for the dead before going off to midnight mass, to have the hearth cakes and the chicken ready for the modest revelllon which should follow and a host of other things, one of the most important of which was a strict injunction to remain fasting until the evening.

'To eat nothing?' Jolival protested. 'When we have enough ado as it is to make her eat like anyone else?'

Madame le Guilvinec raised an admonitory finger to the blackened rafters:

'If she wants to see miracles happen on the holy night, or even if she wants her own wishes to come true, she must take nothing all day long, not until after dark when she can count nine stars in the sky. If she is still fasting when the ninth star comes out, then she can expect to have a gift from heaven.'

Arcadius, being a rational man with a strong aversion to anything that smacked of superstition, might have muttered a little, but Marianne was deeply attracted by this romantic prophecy. It was with eyes suddenly softened that she looked at the widow from Pont-Croix, standing there in her black garments, like some antique sibyl.

'The ninth star,' she said seriously. 'I will wait, then, until it is out. Although in this fog—'

'The fog will go away with the tide. God bless you and keep you, young lady. Nicolas Mallerousse did well to leave his house to you.'

With one last stroke for her cat which she was leaving with her neighbours, she was gone and Marianne, watching her wide, black cloak billowing along the road to the church, felt oddly sad for a moment. Just as Madame le Guilvinec had predicted, the fog was already beginning to clear, blown away by the gusts of wind that had got up, and by the beginning of the afternoon it had gone completely, leaving the countryside restored to all its wild beauty. It was about an hour after this that a lugger with red sails entered the harbour channel below the castle and came on up the Penfeld. The Saint-Guénolé had reached the rendezvous. The adventure had begun.

That evening, when it was quite dark, Marianne, Jolival and Gracchus left the house silently. They locked the door behind them, having taken care to leave a window open and unshuttered so that Madame le Guilvinec's cat, left with ample supplies of fish and milk, might come and go at will. Gracchus skipped lightly over the low garden wall and slid the key under the neighbour's door, along with a note explaining that Marianne and her 'uncle' had been obliged to return to Paris unexpectedly.

It was long after the time when the castle gun and the great bell of the prison had announced the end of work for the day and the church bells had rung for evening prayer, yet the town was not going to sleep as it usually did. The ships of war were dressed overall and as the lights went up on the mastheads so the lighted sterncastles showed that those aboard were keeping their own Christmas Eve. From the taverns came the sounds of lusty voices singing everything from the old Christmas carols down to lewd sea shanties, while the streets were full of people, whole families of them, all in their best caps and bonnets, the men carrying in one hand a lantern and in the other the knotted wooden staff called the pen-bas, and all hurrying off to spend the evening with friends until the time came round to go to church. There were groups of small boys as well, armed with beribboned branches, going the rounds of the houses knocking on doors and singing carols for all they were worth, for the reward of a few coins or a cake apiece. The whole town basked in the aromatic scents of cider, rum and pancakes.

The three of them attracted little notice, in spite of the small box containing Marianne's few clothes and her jewels which Gracchus carried under his arm, beneath his heavy cloak, and her own carpet bag. There was little to mark them out from other pedestrians that night.