The Emperor's Gold

by Robert Wilton

  M. Gabin:

  I trust the Minister not to need a repetition of my commitment.

  M. Fouché:

  Quite so. It has come to my attention, with no possibility of doubt, that there is a spy in the immediate vicinity of the Minister for the Navy – or perhaps even myself. You may take this as an example of the reach of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey. I expect to know more very soon. Even if it should be Minister Decrès himself, you will begin now to find this person, to discover everything they know, and to deliver them to me for punishment.

  [SS F/109/77]

  The records show that Henry Forster, of Lewes in the County of Sussex, entered Corpus Christi College, in Oxford University, in 1795. The records show solid academic achievement, at a time when the majority of his fellow students used that ancient institution as an architecturally striking drinking club and made no pretence at scholarship whatsoever. Henry Forster was reading for the Church, and the records show that he graduated as a Doctor of Divinity in 1799.

  The records do not show Henry Forster’s frustration at the prevailing attitudes of his fellows. They do not show his growing interest in natural philosophy. They do not show – although some indiscreet individuals could tell the story – a highly unfortunate dispute with the Bishop of Oxford over certain points of theology and science. The records do not show doubt, and disappointment, and drifting ambition, and crises of faith uncovered in the bottom of a tankard and the glimpse of a woman’s shoulder across a sweating tavern.

  Other records show the death of Henry Forster’s father, and the inheritance by Henry’s elder brother of the family property in Lewes. They do not show Henry’s previous estrangement from his father, nor the long-standing mutual indifference of the brothers.

  Further records show Henry Forster’s assumption of the role of vicar in the parish of All Saints, Oakham, in the County of Rutland, in 1800. Those records do not show, nor need they, how disappointing an appointment this might have seemed to those who had held such hopes of the promising young scholar when he went up to the university five years before.

  Henry Forster’s name does appear on another record, not publicly available. It is dated October 1802. It gives Henry Forster’s name – unusually, since shortly afterwards names began to be replaced with cipher marks in this series of records – his position and his background.

  HENRY FORSTER, VICAR OF ALL SAINTS, OAKHAM IN THE COUNTY OF RUTLAND.

  Family alienation; professional disappointment; philosophical doubt. Self-knowledge. Credit ++. KK

  [SS K/A/50]

  No record, not even that long-buried page, can show the autumn night in 1802, the rattle at the door biting sharp through the gusting wind, the gaunt older man on the threshold, the offer of hospitality, the conversation at first polite, then more intelligent and intellectual, the mutual probing and the earnest disputes. No record can capture an exchange that continued through a whole night, and the relationship that developed.

  OAKHAM IN THE COUNTY OF RUTLAND, VICAR THE REVD HENRY FORSTER, VISITED THE 26TH DAY OF JULY 1805.

  A regular gathering of thinking men. Possible knowledge of tailor. More to follow

  [SS K/50/43]

  The daylight caught the Vicar’s spectacles, and Roscarrock was examined by two shimmering white discs. They were level with his own eyes, and flashed into his face as the two men stood silent in the doorway each waiting for the other to speak. Then the beams dropped to scrutinize his clothes, and the dark eyes behind them were momentarily visible.

  The Vicar frowned in happy curiosity, and his mouth half-opened as if he was trying a taste on his tongue. Decided, he said with satisfaction, ‘You’re from Kinnaird.’

  Not how it was supposed to begin. ‘I’m – The King’s roads are a weary place for the traveller.’

  ‘Come in! Yes, they must be. Have you come directly from—’ The Reverend Forster was leading the way in, then turned back to where Roscarrock still stood on the threshold. ‘I’m sorry. Mischievous of me. I’m supposed to say something in return there, aren’t I? Sir Keith is such a brute about these procedures, and one of my little pleasures in life is not playing his game.’

  Roscarrock smiled and stepped onto the flagstones of the hall. ‘I’m sure who you are, Reverend. Are you sure who I am?’

  The Vicar grinned at him, clapped him on the shoulder and closed the front door. ‘There’s a type. A certain… quality of silence.’ He led the way into a parlour, established Roscarrock in a chair after proper introductions, and went to get drinks. Roscarrock looked around at the oak and leather furniture, the books, the handsome chess set, the few pieces of silver. It was more a man’s space than it was a clergyman’s. Nothing explicitly religious, and certainly nothing feminine. He hadn’t gathered before whether the Vicar was married, but knew now.

  ‘Wine for you, water for me. I assume this is a business visit.’ The Vicar sat opposite him.

  ‘If it becomes social, I’m sure you know someone to manage the necessary conversion.’

  The Vicar chuckled politely, and pulled off his spectacles. He was younger than Roscarrock had first guessed – about his own age, and with the colour and vitality of an outdoor life. ‘I say,’ he began with sudden earnestness, ‘Sir Keith’s in health, is he?’ He seemed momentarily more nervous.

  ‘So far as I know.’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell you if he wasn’t.’ Forster had relaxed again. ‘Probably wouldn’t tell himself. His body will decide that it’s a secret his brain need not know about. Have you seen him recently?’

  ‘A week or two back.’

  ‘And no doubt he’s off on his travels, somewhere between Manchester and the moon, and hasn’t told anyone where he’s going. Tell me’ – he leant forwards – ‘did he… choose you himself?’

  Roscarrock hesitated. ‘Yes – like you.’

  ‘Good. That’s good. It’s months since I’ve actually had a visit from him. I write the occasional report, of course, but it’s nice to get a visit. You don’t play chess, I suppose?’

  ‘I only know sailor’s rules, and bits of bone and cloth for pieces.’

  ‘Sailor’s rules? Now that would be something.’ He cocked his head sideways. ‘That explains the… the watchfulness about you. Have you somewhere to stay?’

  ‘My colleague is trying to get us a room at the inn.’

  ‘I’m sure I can find you a stable hereabouts if not.’

  Roscarrock smiled. He was relaxing into the Vicar’s chatter, and that even more than the memory of the crude games of chess they had played brought poor drowned Simon Hillyard to his mind.

  He sat deliberately more upright.

  Reverend Forster folded his hands in his lap. ‘You’re probably wanting to ask me if I’ve uncovered any conspiracies lately.’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s out the way, then.’ He sat back. ‘You must get an unusual insight. As Vicar you talk to everyone – listen to everyone – as no one else can.’

  ‘That’s why the Government uses us as it does. You’re presumably worried that my parishioners will be marching on London shortly to murder the Cabinet.’

  ‘I’d rather they didn’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re taking a lax approach to the Commandments, aren’t you?’

  The Vicar was leaning forwards again, his face more lively. ‘I mean: have you, personally, taken an active decision to join the side you have? Have you reviewed the arguments and decided that the Cabinet should be saved?’

  ‘Of course not. Very well – good question. I suppose’ – Roscarrock swept a hand through the dark mat of hair – ‘for me it’s like a ship. The Captain may be a bastard, and the rules can seem foolish, but if there isn’t a captain and his orders aren’t followed, there’s chaos.’

  ‘Better tyranny than anarchy?’

  ‘Better servants than drowned men. Tell me, Reverend: does this line of questioning come from a unive
rsity education, or from time among your flock?’

  ‘Also a good question. The former. Spending time among my flock gives me every sympathy for the poor wretches. But my curiosity about the natural order is an intellectual one. Aren’t you curious?’

  ‘The faces would move me long before the ideas did. I’ve seen a whole village trying to survive poverty and near-starvation and the knowledge of its own hopelessness. I’ve lived that once myself, and I see the same faces in villages everywhere. I don’t blame a one of them for wanting to cut off the King’s head, out of pure impotence. I just don’t think it would help.’

  ‘No. The French have proved that to my satisfaction. You must have some more wine.’

  When he came back with two drinks, the Vicar was distracted in thought. He handed Roscarrock his drink, sat back in his chair and screwed his eyes closed. ‘I think… that it must be a natural predisposition of a government to think in purely governmental terms.’ He opened his eyes again with the air of one expecting to have conjured something magical, but found only Tom Roscarrock watching him patiently. ‘The Government has no imagination beyond its own limited vocabulary. The only consequence it can imagine, out of the terrible variety of our national distress, is an attack on elements of government.’

  ‘Self-preservation.’

  ‘That’s Kinnaird the businessman talking. Lack of imagination is what it is. It sends men like you to ask men like me whether anyone’s threatened to kill the King in the last week. It waits fearfully for a crude attack on itself. It uses paid agents to incite conspiracies that would never naturally form, in order to prove that the world works as it wrongly believes. The Home Office thinks it’s being very clever, drawing potential conspirators into the open to be able to crush them, but it’s only reinforcing its own delusions. The Government creates a game that no one else wants to play, writes the rules, cheats at them, and declares itself the winner. This is the pedantry and wilfulness of a child.’

  ‘Reverend, I enjoy what I understand of your argument. I come from a place where rebellion’s bred into us – it’s something in the air, like the salt. There’ve been times in the last couple of years when London ceased to have any control there at all. You may find it funny, but I’ve grown up happy never to have anything to do with the Government. And I don’t claim to have followed all its laws. But government isn’t something you can choose to play with or not. It may not be efficient or fair, but it’s how the world is built and how it’s managed and how it’s defended. Chess would be just pointless manoeuvring, without a king.’

  ‘Why not an emperor?’

  ‘Now you’re just changing labels. And changing them violently, which helps no one.’

  Reverend Forster was waving his empty glass to emphasize what was coming; Roscarrock wondered if he’d switched to wine after all. ‘It is crude and ignorant government thinking to imagine that everyone is in one of two states – in a conspiracy to overthrow the Government, or not. Kinnaird would tell you that. Unintelligent. As if I was to stand in my pulpit and divide the congregation into sheep and goats. I don’t claim always to like or sympathize with them, but I try to understand them.’

  ‘And that’s why I’m here.’

  It had been Joseph’s happy discovery that one of the doors sealed up by the Minister to create his more closed, windowless study enabled him to listen to a conversation inside without the disastrous possibility of the door suddenly being opened. Now he pulled away from the panels with blood in his cheeks and bile in his mouth. The Minister knew. Of course he knew. There was no one more likely to be the spy than his own servant, his Joseph. The Minister was considering the possibility of a spy in the other Minister’s house merely for completeness. In a matter of seconds the two men would come out of the closed room and they would come for him. The Inspector, the man of famous ruthlessness, the man with the face of a pig and the open, enchanting eyes of a virgin. The Minister, the man of fatal logic, to whom the guilty person would be delivered for punishment.

  He must run. If he could get out of the house, he could run. He could get to a horse; he could get to the river. He might be able to outdistance the Inspector racing behind him, at least for a while. He could run and he could find somewhere to hide. Even in the little garden, there might be a bush, or a hole, somewhere to hide, like at Doudeville. Run!

  But to run he must run past the door to the Minister’s office. Even a single outstretched arm of the Inspector, such a solid man he seemed, would be enough to block the passage. Through the sealed door he could hear – nothing. They had stopped talking. Were they now listening to him? His hammering heart, his shaking hand, could these be heard? Of course not, surely. ‘That’s silly, isn’t it, Joseph?’ Oh, Lady Sybille, I wish you had not gone and that none of this had happened. Why can’t we be back there then? Why am I lost and tied in this now?

  Clear footsteps from inside the office – footsteps across the floor – and now the soft rush of the oiled door opening, the Inspector and the Minister coming for poor Joseph. Could he hide in the recess of his listening place? If he pushed himself against it might he somehow not be seen? That’s silly, isn’t it, Joseph? Here was the solid body of the Inspector in the passage, here was the Minister following him.

  They turned away. ‘A signal will come from London when all is ready,’ the Minister was saying. ‘Within a fortnight, I anticipate. Then the fleets will converge.’ He was shepherding the Inspector towards the back door of the house and away. What deception was this?

  He still couldn’t run. The Minister and the Inspector were in the way. Perhaps he could run out the front once the Minister had turned for the back, but the Minister would hear the running, and he surely couldn’t run into that street with so many people staring at him. He was shuffling, weaving, edging forwards, his fingers following the wall and seeking its certainty. Beside him was the open door of the study, the open trap, the place where a man would be delivered to the Minister for punishment.

  ‘You always panic so, Joseph. Always with the longer words.’ ‘I’m so sorry, Lady Sybille, but there’s just too much to try to take in.’ On the desk there were two leather folders. The open door, the open trap, the room of no light where a man was delivered to die.

  ‘Just start at the beginning; just one little piece at a time.’ Thank you, Lady Sybille.

  Joseph was six paces into the room of no light, six bewildering paces, when his spirit broke and he grabbed one of the leather folders and ran.

  The Reverend Forster had switched to wine. He loosened his neckcloth, rolled his shoulders and stretched his legs out, before settling again. Roscarrock warmed to the young man in him, wanted to see him unleashed on a beast of a horse for a morning’s hunt, or grinning into a gale.

  ‘So, Mr Roscarrock. When Cobb, my servant, damns me and the King and God and all his angels because his new baby has just died, is that sedition? When he tells his friend in the inn how much I have to eat, and after their second drink they say how handy it would be if they could take just some of my bread and meat, is that sedition? They’re contemplating a hangable crime now, yes? The day after, it’s Sunday, and that man looks up at me in the pulpit and when I preach obedience to God and the King he looks at his shrivelled wife and fly-covered children and says quietly to the man in the next row that it’d be better if the King were dead and God minded his own business and some of the royal silks and church silver got shared around, is that sedition? If a woman comes to me and confesses some of those thoughts, and I tell her that God understands and that her anger is natural, is that sedition? One night, a local weaver turned up at my gate with a mug of beer in his gut and a nasty-looking knife in his hand. He wasn’t used to either, but the collapse in prices meant he could no longer live in the home in which he’d been born, his world was collapsing, and since I was the nearest thing to authority he’d come to kidnap me or kill me. One of the two; neither of us was sure. If the King had been passing he’d have done the same to him, or the First Lord
of the Admiralty, or the Archbishop of Canterbury or the man who weighs the fish at Stamford market. Violent sedition. I listened to him, let him cry in the corner, gave him a glass of wine and he wandered off into the night.’

  ‘You’ll get no argument from me on the realities of life.’

  ‘There are one or two useful new men in these parts, Roscarrock. Prudent, industrious, successful. They’re insulted that they’re not allowed to vote. They want change to the political system. They’re the ones who give money to the travelling radical man for his boots and his bed, because he’s pushing what they want and maybe he has the words to stir up enough of a movement to get it. Active support for sedition.’

  Roscarrock watched patiently.

  ‘Once every month, Roscarrock, I ride over to Grantham, where I and a group of like-minded men – parsons, a couple of doctors – talk sedition. Not an evening’s drunken dreaming in the inn, but clever men seriously analyzing the merits of a different order on earth. Not just changing this or that minister, or even king, but utterly changing the structure of society. Perhaps one of us has heard some radical ideas from an itinerant preacher. Perhaps another has read something new from France. We share those ideas, evaluate them. Sir Joseph Plummer, you’ve heard of him? Brilliant man – what I would call a truly honest mind. The purest heart, and he believes firmly in complete social revolution. “Liberty is not a gift or a prize; it burns within us and we must choose to give it air.” Brilliant. He was the guest of one of us, and we benefited from his discourse.’

  He grinned. ‘Rather an equivocal position, wouldn’t you say? Picked associate of the Government’s most brilliant intelligencer, and I’m with a group of like-minded fellows and we’re describing an upheaval with more clarity than any of your radicals and malcontents could dream of. Now, let me reassure you and Sir Keith: there is not a single chance in a million that any one of us would pick up a pitchfork or pull a pistol on the Prime Minister. We are products and beneficiaries of the established order. But it is our habit when we see a fault to look for its remedy. And when we find an idea, we explore it to its full.’