Previous – Book1 Page110 – Next
“OK, not very far then!”
Having been listening to the conversation from the kitchen, Mme. Troyes picks up the story.
“Paris was awful then. Everywhere was awful. Without enough food, people killed their animals and ate them. One day when he was walking on the far side of the paddock, Monsieur Troyes saw the mobs arrive, the rich family fled immediately, two of them managed to mount their horses, and the rest fled on foot. The mob killed the remaining horses and dragged off the carcasses. By now, Monsieur Troyes was hiding in the woods, he had seen enough, and he knew that it wasn’t safe to stay a moment longer. He fled with nothing more than the clothes he was wearing.”
Henri Troyes continues, “Monsieur Troyes was a young, single man, fit and healthy, and he ran. He went north. I don’t know how many days it took him to reach Dieppe, but when he reached the coast he worked as a fisherman for about three years. And then he was press ganged. Forced to join the pirates. Or the Navy. Or the pirates. Or something! We’re not sure what it was by then. Maybe the military had been infiltrated by pirates, or the pirates had recruited a lot of ex servicemen.”
“So he became a pirate?” asks NutJob.
KristalClear feels able to join in again, now that the conversation has moved on to ships rather than horses, “he was a pirate, but he wasn’t a pirate. He just ended up working as a sailor trying to steal anything he could from the ships along the coast of Sussex. There was still a Royal Navy back then. Better trained and better equipped than the French pirates. So his capture was inevitable really.”
“Escaped death three times,” says M. Troyes “wasn’t caught up in the rebellion in Paris, didn’t die in the famine, and miraculously he wasn’t killed in the Second Battle of Hastings. He ended up in a military prison in Woolwich.”
“Oui Papa, je l’ai déjà dit.” says KristalClear, before turning her attention to NutJob once more, “the government didn’t have any money for prisons, or food for the prisoners.
Previous – Book1 Page110 – Next