by H. G. Parry
Less than an hour later, the palace reappeared, quiet and solid as before. What had happened within its walls was never quite agreed upon. No harm had been done to the delegates within—to them, the building had been plunged into darkness, and the soldiers entering its invisible door had found its corridors awash with shadows. The arrival of the army with swords raised was a relief for some, the final straw for many. Bullied by Lucien and Napoléon, fearful of the dark, the majority agreed to sign the stupid piece of paper so they could go home. Some sixty were arrested as traitors to the Republic.
The Directory was over.
“Good magic,” Napoléon said to Sieyès. It was the most praise he ever gave his battle-mages.
Sieyès managed a wan smile. There were streaks of gray in his hair, and his face had the hollowed look of a much older man. “I was a Templar once, before all this. A research magician. That was a piece of magic I developed but never used. It took more effort than I thought.”
It was an understatement, Napoléon thought. He suspected Sieyès would never quite be the same again. This was all to the good.
“Well,” he said. “It worked.”
It had been a bloodless coup, and somehow, though it had begun as Sieyès’s coup, it had ended as Napoléon’s. Sieyès, Napoléon, and one of the remaining directors were all named Consuls, but Napoléon was First.
That night, when Napoléon fell at last into a light sleep, he woke in his childhood Corsica. He had not done so since Egypt, though he had felt the force of his friend’s approval behind his plan. The contrast to the dirty, frosty streets of Paris was unexpectedly sharp; for a moment, an unexpected pang of nostalgia stung his heart.
His friend left him no time for sentimentality. “Well, that succeeded with little help from you. What in the world did you think you were doing trying to address the assemblies?”
“You could have helped,” Napoléon complained. Even in his sleep, he felt flushed and rumpled, and his head hurt.
“I thought you didn’t want me to nudge without your permission,” his friend said with an arched brow. His exasperation, though, was mingled with amusement. “All you needed to do was keep quiet. If I’d wanted an orator or a mesmer, I’d have stayed with Robespierre. Still, no matter in the end. It all went according to plan.”
“I sounded like an idiot,” he said, but his ego was less tender than it had been. It was difficult to feel insecure when he had just been given a country to rule. “I’d far sooner talk to soldiers than politicians.”
“You did. And now they all think you survived an assassination attempt and saved the Republic, and you’re the First Consul of France.”
“Sieyès won’t be content to leave me there for long.”
“Oh, Sieyès.” There was a touch of weariness to his dismissal. “He’s a means to an end. If he steps out of line, we can deal with him, but I would keep him on your side for now.”
“Why?”
“Because he believes in the Republic, and he’s able to articulate those beliefs. Frankly, Bonaparte, you don’t, and you can’t.”
“I do believe in the Republic.”
“You believe in yourself. It’s refreshing, truly. I hope soon most of Paris will feel the same. But all the same, for now, best leave the moral justifications for your actions to those who care about them. Sieyès is no threat.”
Napoléon could have said more. His friend spoke again before he could.
“In truth,” he said, and his voice was unexpectedly serious, “I doubt anyone in France poses a political threat to you anymore. You should continue to play the game, of course, but the board has changed. The Revolution is over. And sooner or later, everyone will realize it.”
Across the Channel, in the House of Commoners, Pitt defended the decision of the king and the government to continue the war with France despite the change in government. Bonaparte, it was true, had offered to discuss terms of peace—he had, against all protocol, contacted George III directly to make the offer. It was a bitterly cold evening, one where even the walls felt too frosted to chime. Pitt caught Wilberforce’s eye as his friend sat with Thornton and several of the other abolitionists, but he had no fear this time of another argument from that quarter. He had stopped by Wilberforce’s town house on purpose, before the session had started, to speak to him privately. The dining room had, as usual, been brimming with voices and laughter and candlelight; he hadn’t gone in, but it had drifted through to the library when Wilberforce came to meet him.
“I assume this is what the enemy intended all along,” Wilberforce had said. His voice sounded stiff by his standards; he obviously heard it and tried to lighten it. “This is what we tried to prevent, and failed. If Bonaparte is working with the enemy, his rise to power means the enemy now has far more control over France than he ever had through Robespierre. He’ll have total control over military strategy.”
“It’s possible,” Pitt agreed, more cautiously. It wasn’t only that he still had no evidence other than his suspicions about the kraken. Any mention of the enemy felt like a precarious step between them these days. He had no desire to be accused of fighting his own personal vampire war again. “We still don’t know for certain that the enemy is working in concert with Bonaparte. The alternative is that his rise is simply that of a military man seizing power by force, in which case it might end as quickly as it began. Either way, I can’t believe it in our best interests to make peace with him, at least not yet. Our only hope of stopping either Bonaparte or the enemy is to win the war with France. The king agrees.”
“And you’re here to find out whether I agree too.”
“I am,” Pitt said frankly. “And, if you don’t, to try to persuade you otherwise.”
“In fact I do agree, this time. The enemy aside, Bonaparte doesn’t strike me as overly committed to peace.”
Pitt found a laugh. “That’s more or less what I plan to tell the House, only with less understatement and more rhetorical flourishes.”
“Some of it will likely be in Latin.”
“Only the parts I want to be sure nobody listens to.”
A smile flickered between them.
“I wish—” Wilberforce started to say, then stopped.
“What?” Pitt asked.
He shook his head. “Nothing.”
Pitt knew exactly what he meant, and it wasn’t nothing. It was everything, but that was just as impossible to put into words.
Wilberforce’s support did very little to calm the opposition. Charles Fox’s faith still remained utterly with France, despite the fact that the Reign of Terror had cost the lives of several of his dearest friends. Others, more moderate, simply felt a chance for peace was being rejected by a warmongering government. They pointed out that it was not Britain’s right to dictate what ruler France should accept; Pitt returned that it was a question of security, that Bonaparte was a usurper and an adventurer who might lose his place any day and leave any peace arrangement in tatters. It was true, of course. What he didn’t mention was that he was more concerned that Bonaparte was more than that, and that he might be here to stay.
He argued all night, as the candles flickered about them and the stars came out. He kept arguing as the walls settled into their symphony, and the crashing eloquence of the opposition merged with the firm, sustained spell of his own. He let himself fall into the familiar exhilaration of finding the right words and fitting them in the purest, most perfect order. It went well, he judged, even though he was not quite at his best. He had been unrelentingly tired lately, and the cough that had been plaguing him all winter was growing worse.
As he had expected, the enemy was waiting for him in his memories when he finally fell asleep in the thin, predawn light. Those memories were fainter this time, and the enemy was stronger—the only color in a world of flickering shadows.
“I hope you haven’t come to make an offer of reconciliation,” Pitt said. “I’ve just invested a great deal of thought into Bonaparte’s. I’ll give co
nsiderably less thought to yours.”
“I’ll make you an offer of a final duel one day,” the enemy said. “That’s how these wars always end. But no. No, our war isn’t over yet. And if it bothers you, entering negotiations with France now would have made no difference to the two of us one way or another.”
“He is yours, isn’t he?” Pitt said. “Bonaparte.”
“You knew,” the enemy said. “You always did.”
And he had. That was the worst part. He had known the moment the news of the kraken had reached him through the daemon-stone, and it had nothing to do with the theory of magic he had discussed with Forester or the political implications he had argued that night in the House of Commoners. The knowledge had come from not his intellect, but the coldest, darkest parts of himself, the parts that knew shadows and bloodlines and that he should, at all costs, be able to ignore.
That, if he were as honest with himself as he tried to be, was the real reason he and Wilberforce had not spoken as friends in months. It was why he had never told him about the enemy’s presence in his dreams, or the way his own magic increasingly strained at his bonds, or the fact that he was taking four times the elixir he used to take and still never quite felt well. It was because when Wilberforce looked at him, he could see a question forming in his eyes. It was the question he had asked once only, the night that had changed everything, and he couldn’t bear to hear it spoken aloud again.
What’s happening to you?
The trouble was, he had no answer. He didn’t know.
“Oh yes,” the enemy said, as if Pitt had spoken his thoughts aloud. “I meant to ask you about that. Have you told Wilberforce about Bonaparte?”
He paused before answering. He needed to make very, very certain the sudden cold shard of fear that had pierced his chest had not penetrated his voice. “I don’t see what Wilberforce has to do with any of this.”
“Nothing at all, if he’s sensible.”
“Is that a threat? Because I must warn you, I do not allow anyone to threaten the lives of people I care about.”
I don’t think in all your life anybody has ever done anything to you, the enemy had said, the night of the naval mutiny. No wonder you don’t understand anger… Perhaps you will, someday.
“I have no plans to hurt anyone in your country,” the enemy said. “But I make no promises either, particularly with regard to Wilberforce. We have our own history, he and I. I’ve already tried to kill him once. Before the Revolution. It was a different world then, wasn’t it? A kinder one for some. For you, certainly. You were loved by your country then.”
“Well. Not all of it,” he said dryly, but unconvincingly. He knew what the enemy meant. He had been young and brilliant and full of promise. The trouble was, youth didn’t last forever, without it brilliance began to look a lot like simple unremarkable cleverness, and politicians made promises all the time. Everyone knew that those promises were rarely kept. He had become another unkept promise—or perhaps a broken one. And every day, deep down where he couldn’t stop himself, he was afraid of becoming something worse.
“For what it may be worth,” the enemy said, “I think you’re doing an excellent job.”
Pitt woke late the next morning and half wished he hadn’t woken at all. Sleep had left him heavy and dull rather than rested, and his mind seemed to drift above a body that was uncomfortably warm and shivery with cold at the same time. He started to open his eyes and winced as the light shot through his head. His limbs ached, and he had a horrible feeling that if he moved a muscle, he was going to be violently sick. This was not the first time in the last few years, nor the worst, but it was terribly inconvenient. Beneath the floorboards, in the rooms below, he could feel the world as a cool, dim fog through which small pockets of human warmth moved like lights. They came through with a clarity that made his head throb in time with their hearts.
This, his instincts were telling him, is how you do not die. He had no desire to hear it. But it frightened him how easy it was to understand.
Dr. Addington had died some years ago—not long, in fact, after his attendance on King George. It had been a personal blow, but it had made no difference to the elixir. The doctor hadn’t prepared it himself for years: the three most difficult pieces of alchemy were done every month by different alchemists and sent to Downing Street, and Pitt had enough skill of his own to combine them without magic. He had been doing it since leaving university, and nothing had ever gone wrong. Even after the outbreak of war, when his magic had started to break its bonds, he hadn’t been particularly concerned. It seemed reasonable to assume that the harder his magic was trying to work, the more it would need to sustain it. He had increased the elixir, then doubled it, and it had seemed to be enough.
He was on four times the elixir now. It wasn’t enough. And he didn’t know what that meant, or what he could do about it. His magic was awake, and it was burning him up from the inside.
This conflict has become less and less a war between nations and more and more a war between two vampire kings, Wilberforce had said.
He didn’t want to be a vampire king—he truly did believe that of himself, even in the darkest places of his doubts. He didn’t want to fight a vampire war.
But he didn’t want to lose one either.
Fina flinched awake in the velvet darkness of her bedroom on Toussaint’s plantation. It was raining lightly outside. A breeze drifted through the half-open window, carrying the scent of sugarcane and damp earth; she breathed it in, trying to chase the feel of London fog from her lungs. She lay awake, her heart hammering, and thought about what she had heard.
When news of the coup in France reached the Caribbean, André Rigaud and his family fled the country. There would be no reinforcements coming from the Directory. In his wake, the very last of the rebellion in the south fell apart. Saint-Domingue, though still a French colony, was now for all practical purposes entirely in the hands of Toussaint Louverture.
PART TWO
THE DEAD
London
Spring 1801
The news reached Wilberforce unexpectedly. Thornton had come in to borrow a book that had probably been Thornton’s originally anyway—books, like gardens, flowers, and ideas, tended to be considered communal property in Clapham. It had taken Wilberforce a while to locate it in the usual Broomfield chaos: he eventually managed to get it from behind the clock on the mantelpiece, as servants of various degrees of infirmity and ineptitude drifted through the living room, the two older Wilberforce children ran or crawled, and Barbara sat calmly in the middle, neither contributing to nor impeding the flurry of people. Outside, it was a bright, cold afternoon, with a hint of a breeze, and Wilberforce was enjoying the excuse that it was Sunday and he couldn’t possibly return to town until the following day.
“Thank you,” Thornton said, as he took it and blew the dust from the spine. “I should be able to give it back to you next week. By the way, what do you make of Pitt’s resignation?”
Wilberforce took a second or two for the words to sink in: he’d never expected to hear them consecutively. “Excuse me?”
“You hadn’t heard? It was in the papers this morning. I thought for certain you’d know more about it.”
“We haven’t exactly been close lately… and I haven’t read the morning papers. I don’t think I’ve even seen the morning papers. Barbara, where are the morning papers?”
“I don’t know, dear,” Barbara said blithely. “But I expect they went to the same place as the breakfast dishes.”
“That is by no means certain, in this house… What did they say?” he asked Thornton. “Why would Pitt resign?”
“Nobody really seems to know,” Thornton said. “The papers are vague. He and the king couldn’t agree about Catholic emancipation and a few other things, but it seems to run deeper than that. All that is known for certain is that William Pitt has resigned as first minister of Great Britain, and that Henry Addington has been appointed in his place.”
“Addington,” Wilberforce repeated, trying to picture it. Addington had been Speaker of the House of Commoners since the year the Bastille was stormed, at Pitt’s arrangement. The two of them had played together as children and been on very friendly terms ever since. He and Wilberforce were less friendly, thanks to Addington’s stance against abolition, but he was a fair-minded Speaker, with a smooth, pale face and pleasant demeanor. Yet Wilberforce would not have thought him strong-willed enough to lead the country through war.
“It’s a disaster from our perspective, of course,” Thornton said. “Addington is as firmly conservative as it’s possible to be. And, obviously, Marianne and I were concerned about Pitt. Is he well?”
“I’m sure he isn’t,” Wilberforce said. “He hasn’t been entirely well in years, to my memory. But I’m equally sure that he wouldn’t resign for that reason.”
“Poor Eliot thought it would be good for him to step down for a few years,” Thornton reminded him.
“Yes, well, Eliot was correct. But that doesn’t mean Pitt would willingly do it. He would see it as a dereliction of duty, or a breach of honor, or one of those Pitt-like phrases.”
“A desertion of his post,” Thornton suggested.
“That sounds Pitt-like.” Wilberforce drew a deep breath and released it, shaking his head. “Something must have happened.”
“Why not call on him tomorrow?” Barbara said from her armchair. “I imagine he’ll be yet in London. I don’t think they throw you out of Downing Street the moment you give notice. He has two decades of possessions to shift out, after all.”
“I doubt he’ll confide in me,” Wilberforce said with a stab of regret. “And it would look terribly interfering to make a call only to find out the details of his resignation and satisfy the curiosity of the Clapham sect.”
“Nonsense,” Barbara scoffed. “You’re all concerned, not curious. He can always refuse to answer your questions, and you can talk about abolition or something.”