The next eleven chapters detail Philip's journey, which, though action-packed, I found the much less interesting than his life on Sark, so I will summarize briefly, focusing on the most important dialogue f the series.
- Within five days, the Swallow encounters La Main Rouge (the Red Hand) and is sunk, with the French cowardly shooting the seamen as they struggle in the waves. Philip is the sole survivor.
- He drifts at sea on wreckage for two days, then is picked up by the
Plinlimmon Castle. Barely has Philip explained to the captain who he is when they encounter La Main Rouge again, who immediately disables and boards the
Plinlimmon Castle, intent on looting. But Philip recognizes the Red Hand's captain:
It was Torode of Herm, and in a flash I saw to the bottom of his treachery and my own great peril. No wonder he was so successful and came back full from every cruise, when others brought only tales of empty seas. He lived in security on British soil and played tinder both flags. By means of a quickly assumed disguise, he robbed British ships as a Frenchman, and French ships as an Englishman. That explained to the full the sinking of the Swallow and the extermination of her crew. It was to him a matter of life or death. If one escaped with knowledge of the facts, the devilment must end. And I was that one man.
- Unfortunately, Torode spots Philip, knocks him out and, most surprisingly, takes him prisoner, instead of killing him. He even brings Philip food and drink, personally. After three days, Philip is blindfolded and taken ashore, to a sea cave with a barred door, very much like the smugglers caves of Sark, where Stephen Gard found the skeleton. Philip realizes he has been taken to Herm, only four miles from home. He is held there for ten days. During one of Torode's twice-daily visits with food, he makes Philip an offer:
"Once you asked to join us and I refused. Now you must join us—or die. I have no desire for your death, but—well—you understand."
"When I asked to join you I believed you honest privateers. You are thieves and murderers. I would sooner die than join you now."
"You are young to die so."
"Go where you can, die when you must," I answered in our Island saying. "Better die young than live to dishonour."
He picked up my dishes and went out. But I could not see why he should have kept me alive so long for the purpose of killing me now, and I would not let my courage down.
One more attempt he made, three days later, without a word having passed between us meanwhile.
"Your time is running out, mon gars," he said, as abruptly as before. "I am loth to put you away, but it rests with yourself. You love Le Marchant's girl, Carette. Join us, and you shall have her. You will live with us on Herm, and in due time, when we have money enough, we will give up this life and start anew elsewhere."
"Carette is an honest girl—"
"She need not know—all that you know."
"And your son wants her—"
When you have had no one to speak to but yourself for fourteen days, the voice even of a man you hate is not to be despised. You may even make him talk for the sake of hearing him.
"I know it," said Torode. "I hear she favours you, but a dead man is no good. If you don't get her, as sure as the sun is in the sky the boy shall have her."
"Even so I will not join you."
"And that is your last word?"
"My last word. I will not join you. I have lived honest. I will die honest."
- Yet, Torode does not kill him, but takes Philip back to the ship. Several days, and one encounter with a French warship later, Philip is again bound and blinfolded, after Torode delivers a final warning
"Listen, you, Carré! By every reason possible you should die, but—well, I am going to give you chance of life. It is only a chance, but your death will not lie at my door, as it would do here. Now here is my last word. You know more than is good for me. If ever you disclose what you know, whether you come back or not, I will blot out all you hold dear in Sercq from top to bottom, though I have to bring the Frenchmen down to do it. You understand?"
- Philip is transferred to a French warship, the Josèphine, which is, of course, at war with the British. Philip is eventually allowed to speak to the captain and tells him the truth about his nationality and Torode. He also agrees to serve on the French ship, on the condition that he not be required to fight against his own countrymen. Initially skeptical of Philip's story, the captain becomes convinces of Philip's honesty when he shows himself willing to accept either flogging or death by firing squad, rather than commit treason. The captain agrees to his terms, telling Philip that, if the ship engages the British, Philip will be asked to do no more than tend to the wounded. Philip travels to Martinique on the Josèphine, and finds, "the life was far less rigorous than on our own ships, and the living far more ample." But he continues to puzzle as to why Torode let him live.
- After four months, the Josèphine is relieved and sails for France. They are nearly there when they are attacked by a British vessel, and the captain keeps his word and sends Philip to assist the ship's surgeon. The battle goes badly for the French, the ship explodes and Philip, having been warned by the good captain, is able to jump into the ocean, although the explosion renders him deaf. Philip is therefore one of the six survivors of the Josèphine, and, as a French-speaking Sark, is taken as a prisoner of war. He does not assert his English citizenship, as he fears being shot as a traitor or conscripted onto an English vessel, both of which he thinks will impede his trip home.He spends a miserable winter in a desolate prison camp near Bristol, but manages to earn some money from bone-carvings, while his hearing recovers. And he continues to puzzle about why Torode let him live.
- Then, in the spring, a wounded man is brought in, who Philip recognizes as Carette's youngest brother, Helier. He has been shot when his own smuggling ship was attacked, and believes his father and brothers dead or conscripted. Philip nurses him back to health, and, by summer, they are ready to try to make their escape. They get their chance when lightening strikes the prison and it catches fire. They make a break for it, plow their way through the bogs and, after help from a good Samaritan and "many a close shave from officious village busybodies, whose patriotism flew no higher than thought of the reward which hung to an escaped prisoner of war or to any likely subject for the pressgang," they are able to steal a small boat and set sail for the French coast, into territory Helier knows well from his smuggling career. From there they make their way to Cherbourg, only a short distance from Sark.
- There, they have an unfortunate chance meeting with Torode, Senior, in a cafe, who recognizes Philip. Philip and Helier hasten to the coast, find a oar-powered boat and set off for Sark, hopeful of beating Torode home and warning the people of his treachery. They make it; but just barely.
Home, sweet, home, but not for long. Philip and Helier escape from Torode to the safety of the island tunnels, and after a rest, head up the hills to their home. They stop first at Jeanne Falla's. Philip leaves Helier behind to explain their survival, and rushes off to his mother's house for yet another tears-of-happiness reunion.
"My boy! my boy!" she cried. "Now God be praised!" and sobbed and strained me to her, and I felt all her prayers thrill through her arms into my own heart.
It was quite a while before we could settle to reasonable talk, for, in spite of her repeated assertions that she had never really given me up, she could still hardly realise that I was truly alive and come back to her, and every other minute she must fling her arms round my neck to make sure.
Philip barely has time for a bite to eat and a catch-up on local news, and learns that Carette's father and oldest brother survived their ordeal with serious injuries, and that Carette is caring for them in their home on Brecqhou. Then, an agitated Krok bursts into the room. Mute, he quickly writes two words: "Torode" and "Carette;" this is enough to tell Philip that Torode had made good on his threat to "blot out all he held dear on Sark."
Torode had swung round Le Tas and run for Brecqhou, where Carette, alone with her two sick men, would be completely at his mercy. He would carry her off, gather his gear on Herm, and be away before Peter Port could lift a hand to stop him. If I held his life in my hand, he held in his what was dearer far than life to me.
Philip immediately rows to Breqhou to seek Carette at her father's house. Failing to find her, and with her bedridden father reporting hearing a gunshot, Philip rushes back to the shore to a dreadful sight.
In the boat that nosed the shore lay Helier Le Marchant, my comrade in prison, in escape, in many perils, with a bullet-hole in his forehead—dead. And I knew that Krok was right and my worst fears were justified.
Philip rows to Herm in search of Carette. He deduces that a likely hiding place for her would be the stone prison in which Torode held him, and happily, he is right.
"Carette!" I cried again.
And out of that blessed darkness, and the doubt and the bewilderment, came the sweetest voice in all the world, in a scared whisper, as one doubtful of her own senses—
"Who is it? Who calls?"
"It is I, Carette—Phil Carré;" and in a moment she was against the bars, and my hands touched her and hers touched me.
"Phil!" she cried, in vast amazement, and clung tight to my hands to make sure. "Is it possible? Oh, my dear, is it truly, truly you? I knew your voice, but—I thought I dreamed, and then I thought it the voice of the dead. You are not dead, Phil?" with a doubtful catch in her breath, as though a doubt had caught her suddenly by the throat.
"But no! I am not dead, my dear one;" and I drew the dear little hands through the bars and covered them with hot kisses.
But past Gorey, where the south-west gales have bitten deep into the headlands, there were places where a quick leap might carry one ashore at cost of one's boat, and then among the ragged black rocks a creeping course might be found where bullets could not follow.
So I turned for Little Sercq, and rowed for dear life and that which was dearer still, and the venomous prow behind followed like a hound on the scent.
Once they jump ashore, they can find shelter from gunfire. Carette runs ahead to get help from the islanders, while Philip hunkers down in the rocks. Torode's men are too fearful to leave the boat and climb the rocks, so young Torode tails Philip alone with a musket. Balancing precariously behind boulder, Philip awaits his chance.
A musket barrel came poking round my bastion, but I was balanced like a fly on the seaward side. Then Torode's dark eyes met mine as he peered cautiously round the corner. He fired instantly, and my footing was too precarious to let me even duck. My left arm tingled and went numb, but before he could draw a pistol I stepped to safer ground and launched my rock at him. It caught him lower than I intended, but that was the result of my insecure foothold. I meant it for his head. It took him between neck and shoulder. He dropped like an ox, and his musket went clattering down the steep. He lay still across the path, very near to the place where, as I looked, I could see again Black Boy's straining eyes and pitiful scrabbling feet as he hung for a moment before falling into the gulf.
A howl and a burst of curses from the cautious ones behind greeted his fall, but I heard no sound of footsteps coming to their leader's assistance.
Unfortunately, Torode is only wounded, not dead, and his men finally get up the slope, carry him back down to the boat and depart.
The pair have several days to rest, recuperate and enjoy each other's company in the cave. Philip agrees to no more voyages. and Carette tells Philip they have been invited to move to her Aunt Jeanne's farm, as she is getting too old to manage it on her own. Philip is able to fill her in on all of his adventures, including her brother's assistance in escape and heroic death: "If he had not come I could not have got to Herm before they set their watch boats. So he helped, you see, though he did not know it."
And, like Philip has done so many times, both wonder why Torode speared his life.
The cave is so dark, they lose track of the days and nights, and believe they have been hidden at least a week. Philip is dozing in the dark when he wakes to an unpleasant surprise.
And in that thick silence and darkness I became aware of another presence in the place besides our own,—by what faculty I know not, but something told me that we were not alone...
Then I heard a movement close to me where I lay on the ground, and, like the lightning out of the thundercloud, there came the click of steel on flint and I breathed soundlessly. It was, at all events, human.
And then my breath caught again. For the tiny lightning flash that came out of the flint lit, with one brief gleam, the face of the man to whom my death was as necessary as the breath of life,—whose presence there held most dreadful menace for us both,—Torode of Herm.
For one moment life stood still with me. For here, in this close darkness, were we three within arm's length of one another;—the man I had reason to fear and hate above any other on earth, and the price of whose life was my own, a price I would not pay; the woman whose life was dearer to me than my own, for whom I would gladly pay any price, even the utmost; and myself, by force of circumstances, the unwilling link that had brought them both there, and the menace to both their lives, for Torode came for me and Carette came with me.
The wheels of life began to turn for me again, and my hand felt stealthily along the ledge at my side, where George Hamon's pistol had lain ever since he gave it to me.
Thoughts surged in my brain like the long western waves in the Boutiques, all in a wild confusion. This man had spared my life. He had come to take it. Carette was at stake.
I knew what I had to do—if I could do it.
He struck again with the steel, and as he bent to blow the tinder into flame his eye caught the gleam of it on Aunt Jeanne's polished milk-can. I know not what he thought it. Possibly his nerves were overstrung with what he had been going through. With an oath he dropped the tinder, and snatched out a pistol, and fired in the direction of the can. And as the blaze lit up the great black bulk of him I stood up quickly and fired also,—and, before God, I think I was justified, for it was his life or ours.
Philip's bullet strikes Torode in the head, rendering him unconscious but, unfortunately, not dead. Philip's sense of honor will not allow him to finish his enemy off, so for a full day they tend to him. Finally, as their food supply dwindles, Uncle George returns. He is stunned to see the unconscious Torode, and strangely, to Philip's way of thinking, brushes back the fiend's black mustache. And, the mystery of why Torode spared Philip's life is solved. Torode is none other than Paul Martel, Philip's father, who he long thought dead.
Philip naturally finds this all hard to believe, and, once convinced, is wracked with guilt over the thought of committing patricide, though George assures him that both he and Carette would have been killed had he not fired the pistol. Neither believes they can turn Philip's father over to the Port Peter authorities. They agree to tell no one else, save Philip's grandfather, who has gone to Port Peter to raise up men to capture Torode's team. They are particularly determined that Rachel not be told.
Philip and Carette are surprised to learn they were only three days in the dark cave, rather than a week.
Philip's grandfather has alerted Port Peter, and a fleet is immediately dispatched to Harm to round up the criminals. Six boats of fleeing pirates attack Sark, but are defeated and rounded up, with help from some Guernsey men. George advises Philip to take his father away as soon as possible, since the man is stil inconveniently alive. With Krok's help, then carry the still-unconscious Martel to a boat, then transport him to Jersey for a doctor, dropping Krok off at the island of Ecrèhous to build a shelter. A Jersey doctor is able to remove the bullet, but Martel is left unable to speak. Initially, Philip provides him with provisions and fishing line, and leaves Krok behind to care for him until he is able to subsist for himself. Martel lives, but in a prison of his own making.
Before I left them I thought it right to explain to Torode just what had happened.
He listened in a cold black fury, but fell soon into a slough of despond. His life was over, but he was not dead. For him, as for the rest of us, death would, I think, have been more merciful—and yet, I would not have had him die at my hands...
Philip makes two more visits, and he
found Torode settled down in dumb bitterness to the narrow life that was left to him.
He was quite recovered in every way save that of speech, but that great loss broke his power and cut him off from his kind.
I had never told him that his wound came from my hand, but he associated me with it in some way, and showed so strong a distaste for my company that I thought well to go no more.,,
And so we left him to his solitude, and he seemed content to have us go. George Hamon, however, ran across now and again in his lugger to see how he was getting on, and to make sure that he was still there.
Philip, happily, is given the five thousand pound reward for putting an end to Le Main Rogue. Now financially independent, he and Carette marry and start a family. Uncle George continues to check on "the exile in Ecrèhous," until one day he finds that Torode has died peacefully in his sleep. George brings the body back, eager to show Rachel that she is at last widowed. They spare her the full story that Martel was Torode, and only tell her they recognized him as part of Torode's crew. They bury him at see, and the door is now open for Uncle George to court the woman that he desired 20+ years earlier.
Uncle George and my mother were married just a month after our little Phil was born, and I learned again, from the look on my mother's face, that a woman's age is counted not by years but by that which the years have brought her.
They have been very happy. There is only one happier household on the Island, and that is ours at Beaumanoir, for it is full of the sound of children's voices, and the patter of little feet.
A fairy-tale ending, not unlike that of Nance and Gard.
So, how might this novel, if indeed it is an epigraph source for The Hallmarked Man, connect to the Strike series?
The most obvious parallel to the Strike series is the father-son dynamic. Both Philip and Strike grow up not knowing their fathers, and with the same last name as their mother. Although he does not seem to care much for him, and no one can call his treatment of his son kind, Martel/Torode does two things for his son, without saying why. First, he initially refuses to take him on as a seaman, which means keeping him well away from his life of crime. Second, even when he knows Philip can blow the whistle on his double-dealing, Torode cannot bring himself to kill his own son. Of course, Philip returns the favor later, when he first saves his father's life, then spirits him away, rather than turn him over to the authorities for a nearly certain death sentence.
- I have speculated for more than five years that Rokeby will turn out to be better than Strike expects, and will perhaps be revealed to have done something, Snape-like, to protect Strike years ago. Some of my ideas are presented at the linked blog post, although much is out of date. Please note that, at the time his post was written, we were told Lucy and Strike were taken to the commune when they were "six and eight respectively" (CC); for unknown reasons, this was changed to age 12 in TRG. Although, that may be wrong as well; Strike tells Robin he was there for "six months in 1985," when would have been ten years old, turning eleven in November. We got no indication that Rokeby played any role in getting Strike out of the Aylmerton Community, and, based on the new dates, it seems the cult did not immediately precede Strike's time in the expensive prep school with Charlie Bristow. I still think it possible Rokeby was paying the tuition at Blakely Prep. and, upon learning that Strike had been suddenly withdrawn, helped Ted behind the scenes to find the children in Brixton and rescue them from their non-existent homeschooling with Shumba.
- In any case, if we learn in THM (or later!) that Rokeby did do something to protect Strike as a boy, Strike and Philip will share the "distant and unloving but occasionally helpful" father theme. What will be interesting is if Strike, like Philip, has an opportunity to return the favor. But, a central theme in Carette of Sark is that the blood-bond between parent and child is somehow sacred, even if there is no relationship. Philip did not even know his father's name when George unmasked Torode. Given that a DNA strand was part of the emoji clues for THM, it is possible that Strike will face a similar dilemma related to Rokeby, or some other blood relation.
Strellacott shippers will be delighted to see the protagonist couple who started out as best friends wind up happily married. And, Philip's instant dislike of Torode, Jr. mirrors Strike's sentiments towards Matthew, and Ryan Murphy, once he begins dating Robin.
Both Strike and Philip have atypical literary talents, given their upbringings. Strike teaches himself Latin, and uses it later both to woo Charlotte and to take those, like Michael Fancourt, who would patronize him down a peg or two. Philip draws solace from the memories of reading, a skill not necessarily valued by the farmers and sailors of Sark, while in prison:
I could people the grim stockade with old friends out of those four most wonderful books of my grandfather's. And very grateful was I now for the insistence which had made me read them times without number, and for the scarcity which had limited me to them till I knew parts of them almost by heart.
The literary works are also alluded to when he and Carette declare their love at the end of the novel, as she says, "You are talking like one of your grandfather's books, Phil."
While I don't expect to see Robin and Strike in naval combat or as prisoners of war, it is still possible that Oxenham's combination adventure/mystery/romance will make some thematic connection to the eighth Strike book.
Next up: Pearl of Pearl Island.
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