The day before the two women were to go back to Escampobar Catherine approached a priest in the church of Ste Marie Majeure, a little unshaven fat man with a watery eye, in order to arrange for some masses to be said for the dead.
“ But for whose soul are we to pray?” mumbled the priest in a wheezy low tone.
“ Pray for the soul of Jean,” said Catherine. “Yes, Jean. There is no other name.”
Lieutenant Réal, wounded at Trafalgar, but escaping capture, retired with the rank of Capitaine de Frégate and vanished from the eyes of the naval world in Toulon, and indeed from the world altogether. Whatever sign brought him back to Escampobar on that momentous night was not meant to call him to his death but to a quiet and retired life, obscure in a sense but not devoid of dignity. In the cour
