“No, no, Monsieur, your wife has paid until the end of the month. I thought I had missed you. Thank goodness I looked out when I did. Here, sir, take a seat, it is a matter of the utmost urgency.”
I sat down in a creaking wooden chair feeling a growing sense of unease. “Well, what is it about, then?” I asked impatiently. “I am leaving first thing in the morning.”
“No, no sir, that is impossible,” he replied as he pulled a key on a chain from his pocket and unlocked a sturdy strong box. “Now, where is it?” he muttered as he started to rummage about in its contents. “Ah, here.” He turned to me, his flabby features stretched into a smile of sorts, and proudly presented me with a letter. For a brief moment I entertained the hope that it might be from Louisa, but then I saw the official embassy seal. Sensing danger, I snatched my hand away without taking it.
“Now look here, I am an officer in the French army, I want nothing to do with any intrigues of the British embassy.” I was going to ride for the coast come hell or high water. The only reason the embassy would contact me now would be to keep me in France, probably on some half-baked new assignment that the novice ambassador had dreamt up in his bath. Well they weren’t getting me caught up in their intrigues again. I gave the hotel manager a stern look and continued, “I suggest that you throw that in the fire and we will just pretend that we never met. Tell them you did not see me and I will leave in the morning.”
The smile on his face melted away into a look of intense disappointment. “You are a British spy,” he said speaking for the first time in English. “Do you think I am a fool? A British liaison officer would wear a British uniform not a French one. I saw you arrive as an Englishman, I saw you go to the embassy and then suddenly pffft,” he gave a flourish of his hand like a conjurer revealing his trick, “you are a French officer with a different name.”
“What is it to you what I am? Even if I were a spy, as a French citizen you should not be helping me.” I thought perhaps I could intimidate him into letting me go and so I stood up, straightened my uniform and added, “As a French officer, perhaps I should report you for your behaviour.”
He did not look the least bit alarmed as he shook his head slowly. “We both know that you will do no such thing. I know what is in the letter and you will read it. Then I will tell my contact with the British that the letter was received. If you refuse to open it then I will tell them that too and you can suffer the consequences of your refusal to help your country when you reach London.”
“Dammit, why should you care what I do?” I had been so close to escaping and now the net was closing around me again. I looked at the letter with suspicion; for all I knew it could have contained orders to assassinate the emperor or kidnap him and take him to London.
“Because the emperor cannot possibly win against all the allies working together. Soon the British will be back in their embassy and they will know that I am a reliable friend amongst the people of Paris.” He held out the letter again, and this time I reluctantly took it. The edges of the seal were slightly proud of the paper. Someone, presumably the manager, had slid a hot knife blade underneath to open the letter without breaking the seal and then tried to stick it down again. Having done the same trick myself, I knew that the edges of the seal never looked quite right unless you used some hot wire to melt the wax at the edges.
The manager, knowing what was in the letter, was determined I should read it. That meant almost certainly that it could not be good news. It was addressed to me just by the initials TF and I snapped the seal and unfolded the letter with a sense of deep trepidation.
TF
Uncle Arthur sends his compliments and requires you to continue in your current duties rather than return home. A mutual friend will send details of how to contact him through the bearer of this note.
S
I guessed the ‘S’ was Stuart, the new ambassador. It was all cloak and dagger with no names and only the seal to prove it came from the embassy, but I did not doubt it was genuine. I had reluctantly acted as a spy for ‘Uncle’ Arthur Wellesley, now the Duke of Wellington, before. With every royalist fleeing the capital he would be delighted to have a man he thought was a valuable agent, disguised amongst the emperor’s men. But it left me trapped on the wrong side of the English Channel. The manager was right about another thing: for all the emperor’s claims of wanting peace there would be war sooner or later. Probably sooner. And what of the emperor and his legendary memory for names and faces? Would he ever remember where he had seen me before? It was like holding a mortar shell with a sputtering fuse: you did not know when it would go off or if it would go off at all, but it would be catastrophic for me if it did.
For a moment I felt sick with despair. Why oh why had I come back to this wretched hotel at all? Now some diligent frog toady to the embassy had got me by the balls and was dragging me from the frying pan into the fire. But then I started to think. I had only been ordered to continue my current duties and no one at the embassy knew precisely what they were, just that I was on Ney’s staff. Surely I could persuade him to send me on some tedious duty somewhere which would keep me well out of danger and of course away from the emperor’s beady eye.
I realised with a sudden chill that I certainly had to move for I could not stay at the hotel. As the manager had proven, too many of the staff would remember me either as an English guest or a French royalist. As if reading my mind the manager spoke again.
“You cannot continue to reside here. I have arranged new accommodation for you at a lodging house on the other side of the city.”
“But this mutual friend mentioned in the letter, whoever the hell they are, how are they going to reach me?”
“Don’t worry, Colonel,” said the manager. He was speaking French again and wore a prim smile of satisfaction now that he thought his obligations were being met. “I will personally forward on any correspondence or messages to your new address. Everyone else at this hotel will think you have left.”
Chapter 18
For the first month my plan worked perfectly. Things only started to go wrong when I let an organ other than my brain influence decisions. Ney arrived in Paris three days after Napoleon. In the intervening time, I had discovered who the mysterious new war minister was. It turned out to be Marshal Davout. I was at last able to place that familiar voice I had heard from under the clothes as the doughty noblewoman who had accosted me when I had first entered the throne room. Davout was fiercely loyal to his emperor. Ordered to hold the Hamburg area during the first allied invasion of 1814, he had held off all allied forces and surrendered only after Napoleon had abdicated. He was also the only French marshal who had not sought a position under the Bourbons, preferring instead to retire to his country house.
While Davout’s loyalty to the emperor was beyond question, the same could not be said for Ney. I spent some time in the officers’ mess at a local barracks where I heard much debate at his damascene conversion from king to emperor and his commitment to fighting the allies. Davout evidently felt that it would be best for his old friend to be out of the way for a while. So on the day Ney arrived in the city he was given orders to leave at once and carry out a tour of inspection of defences in the north and east of the country.
While the marshal was morose at this further evidence that he was not trusted, I barely hid my delight, for this was excellent news. Accompanying my chief I would be away from Paris and the curious gaze of the emperor for at least a month. Not only that, but I was then ideally placed to send my own report on France’s defences to the allies as though I was diligently doing my duty as a spy.
So we set off on our expedition and I’ll vouch that an enemy agent has never been given an easier time to do his work. Ney and his trusty aide were welcomed at every town, given excellent food and board along with guided tours of every dilapidated fortress, gun emplacement and bastion across north-eastern France. I would make notes of my own and add to them the observations of Ney as we went around various bat
tlements. Sometimes the governors of fortresses would provide me with their own lists of guns, calibres and ammunition stores to save me even that effort and ensure that the right details reached Paris. It was absurdly easy and it would have been almost pleasurable if Ney had not been in such a tearing hurry to get the job done.
As March turned into April, the news sheets and bulletins from the capital showed that the pace of government had changed dramatically from that under the fat, indolent king. Even from a hundred miles away it was clear from what we read that the emperor was frenetically working to transform France before the allies had the chance to react to his return. Unpopular taxes were revoked, royalist land and assets seized, appeals made to the allies for peace, public works started and new ministers appointed.
There was still some opposition, a revolt against the emperor’s return in the more royalist south had been put down by a former aristocrat cavalry general called Grouchy, while another uprising simmered in the west of the country. But even where people were not openly in rebellion, the emperor’s return had ignited a wide array of conflicting hopes. The Bonapartists wanted a return to the glory days of the empire; Jacobins wanted to go back to the fiery principles of the Revolution, while most of the landed middle class just wanted a period of peace and prosperity.
To keep everyone happy, Napoleon launched the work to create a new constitution. To show that it would not simply be a puppet to his rule, he put one of his most outspoken critics in charge of drawing it up. I confess I was surprised, I did not expect him to give up that much control of France, but when I mentioned that to Ney, he just laughed.
“He has not given up any control,” the marshal told me. “If he wins the coming war then he will be unassailable and he will be able to do what he likes regardless of the constitution. And if he loses the war then it will not matter.” It was a cynical response from an increasingly cynical man. For several evenings now I had endured Ney bemoaning how Napoleon, for whom he had risked his life so many times, would no longer even receive him. He had been sounding as bitter as he had done when he had been waiting to attack his old emperor.
“You are sure it will be war, then?” I asked. There had been speculation in the papers that if France formed some kind of constitutional monarchy, such as we had in Britain, it might be enough to appease the allies.
“Of course there will be war,” growled Ney as we stood alone together on the battlements of some forgotten fortress. I cannot remember which town we were in now, but it was a grey miserable day with a steady drizzle of rain and the wet stonework and guns looked similarly depressing. I reached out and tugged on a loose stone on the edge of the battlements. The rock moved and then tumbled down into the moat below with a splash.
“Then why is it just us inspecting the fortifications?” I asked. “Surely there should be teams of engineers strengthening them?”
“You have not fought with him, have you?” asked Ney with a softer tone to his voice now. “He will not stay still in a fortress. He wins because he can move faster than his enemies, strike them when they least expect it and confuse them as to his intentions. He cannot do any of that hiding behind stone walls.” He grinned ruefully at me. “Don’t lose hope, Colonel. You don’t know him as I do. He is at his most dangerous when his enemies think he is beaten.”
“But if the allies unite against us, will we really still stand a chance?” I asked.
“Not if he waits much longer. We should have launched an attack as soon as he got back to Paris to catch them off guard. Instead, we are wasting our time out here.” Ney picked up a lump of loose mortar from between the stones and hurled it out over the moat in frustration. “Every day he waits the allies get stronger. The British and the Prussians are gathering men near Brussels. They will soon have more than we can hope to muster.”
“What about the Russians and the Austrians? There has been little about their armies in the papers.”
“The Russians will take months to get here and the Austrians will make a lot of noise, but will hold back to see who is winning.”
“Why would the Austrians hold back?”
“Because they are cunning bastards and the emperor’s heir is also the Austrian emperor’s grandson. They know that Napoleon will do anything to get his son back, so they will look to gain whether we win or lose.” Another flurry of rain soaked us and Ney snarled his annoyance and picked up another rock to fling over the moat. He issued a string of oaths he must have learned in his trooper days before exploding, “What a God-awful waste of time this is. We should have chased the Prussians half way to fucking Berlin by now.”
I had long since discovered that patience was not one of Marshal Ney’s strong suits. While I would have been content to sit out the whole war on this pointless but completely safe exercise, he found it immensely frustrating. He had irrevocably tied his fortune to the emperor, but now had to stand and watch as, in his view, the chance of victory steadily diminished.
I will spare you the details of that tedious tour. Each night I would draft a report of the day’s observations and keep some notes back for my own submission to Wellington. Ney would sign the report, often without bothering to read it, and then it would be submitted to Paris. Ney was always insistent that we listed where we were heading next – he did not want any delay in receiving the hoped for recall from the emperor. But while couriers did arrive, mostly from Davout, who made a point of keeping his old comrade informed, nothing came with the longed for imperial seal. In the end, I think it was Davout who summoned Ney back to Paris.
We arrived back in the city in mid-April and by then any pretence at hoping for peace had passed. In every barracks and officers’ mess, there was a hive of activity as old soldiers and former prisoners of war re-enlisted, new recruits were trained and all were equipped with weapons and uniforms. Old commanders were being brought out of retirement. Grouchy the young general who had beaten the royalists in the south was made a marshal and even General Bourmont, who I had expected to have fled with the royalists, turned out to have stayed in France and retained his division. My old friends Lagarde and de Briqueville had both been given new units, but when the Prince of Moscow, Marshal of France and hero of countless battles finally had a private audience with his emperor, he walked away without command of even a squadron of cavalry.
Ney had endured enough and decided to retire back to his country seat at Coudreaux. I had supposed that this would leave me free to tool around Paris without any duties, and so it would have if I had not been led astray by my loins. We were sitting in Ney’s Paris house when a note arrived from Davout. Ney was set to leave the city the following day and the war minister was inviting him for a farewell dinner.
“You are welcome to come too,” said Ney passing me the note. “But there will be just Davout and some friends and family present. No one will mind if you cannot accept.” I was about to decline when I remembered the delectable Pauline. As Davout’s niece, there was a good chance that she would be present. I had unfinished business there and she had been game before her aunt had arrived. I hesitated briefly, wondering if the aunt would recognise me from the glimpse she’d had of us together that night. But the fearsome duchess had also seen me with Ney’s wife and I suspected that if she had recognised me, I would have heard about it by now. No, Pauline was too pretty and willing to ignore. The dinner would be the perfect opportunity to arrange an assignation to pick things up where we had been forced to leave them.
“I would be honoured to accept,” I told Ney before leaving to get myself spruced up for the evening. A few hours later, wearing my best uniform with buttons and sword hilt polished to a gleam, I found myself stepping into the war minister’s drawing room. The man himself welcomed me, giving my efforts at presentation a cursory glance like a schoolmaster checking the cleanliness of boys before they entered the refectory.
“Glad you could come,” he said gruffly. “You have been a valuable aide to the marshal.” He started to steer me towards a group of
army officers, including Ney, on the far side of the room. “Now, apart from the marshal, who here do you know?”
He probably thought that I was some ambitious little sycophant trying to ingratiate myself with him, but instead of studying the officers my gaze had strayed to the group of ladies by the fire. To my delight Pauline was there, sitting between two elderly ladies and struggling to hide that she was bored to death. Sensing my gaze she looked up and beamed with delight.
“Why, Colonel Moreau, what a pleasure to see you here.”
“The pleasure is all mine, ma’am,” I responded gallantly as she got up and came towards me.
Davout had stopped and was watching the pair of us with a puzzled frown. “I had no idea you knew my niece,” he said as he gave me a new appraising look. He was clearly changing his mind about my motives for being there and asked, “Where did you meet Pauline?”
“Yes I would be interested in knowing that too,” came a new voice. When I turned around there was the minister’s wife, the Duchess of Auerstaedt, glaring at me with unbridled suspicion.
“We met at an art gallery,” I said, mentioning the first place I could think of where a respectable young lady might mingle with an unintroduced stranger.
The glare from the duchess only darkened and her lips compressed into a tight line of disbelief.
“Well it was not so much a gallery as an exhibit,” said Pauline brightly as she put her arm through mine. “We met at the Elephant of the Bastille.” The lips relaxed slightly as though this was more plausible, but I still felt as welcome as a turd on a crumpet. At least I had seen the Elephant of the Bastille, which meant I could answer questions if pressed. The old Bastille prison, which had been stormed at the start of the Revolution, had been torn down and there had been much debate as to what would replace it. The emperor had finally approved a huge statue of an elephant as a fountain, with water spurting from its trunk. It was to be a colossal structure – you could have ridden a real elephant underneath it – and consequently it would cost a fortune to make in bronze. While the base had been built, plans for the casting had been put on hold. Instead, a full-scale model had been built of plaster, which was now on display. I had seen it when touring Paris with Louisa; we had been shown around by a guard who lived in one of the animal’s legs.
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