Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  They remain, however, bedevilled by the instabilities roused by the same movement that has set them on their task. The business of surveying and triangulation naturally requires a deal of equipment, unfamiliar to the ignorant, and repetitive and pedantic technical proceedings of a peculiarity likely to excite curiosity and indeed suspicion among minds conditioned to fear and hostility. We learn that Delambre has been much delayed by angry sceptical peasants near St-Denis. Were they set on by your long hand reaching from London? In any case, his will not be an easy journey.

  And yet they will persevere, and they are like to have the authority of the new regime, for its high-priests do idolize science.

  E. E.

  [SS F/24/141 (DECYPHERED)]

  Day now, and the ministry pattering with its regular rhythms. Once he was sure that the Minister of the Interior was alone, Danton found an excuse to visit his office.

  ‘What’s young Fouché up to then, eh?’

  ‘Very able man, Fouché.’ Minister Roland regathers the papers on his desk. With Danton, there’s always the impression he’s about to break something, or grab it. ‘Most committed to the security of the Revolution.’

  ‘Quite. Very good. Hope he’s not wasting his time with pedantries.’

  Roland smooths his papers. ‘There’s a great deal of . . . passion, Danton. Ideals. Powerful wonderful dreams.’ His hands shelter his papers from the passion. ‘A few of these cooler heads, like Fouché, will help to keep us straight. Keep us effective.’ He means: Fouché reassures me in the face of your volatility, Danton. ‘He’s not a factionalist. I respect that.’

  Danton thinks, Fouché is his own personal faction. ‘Well that’s good,’ he says. ‘So why is he stirring up doubt about Collenot?’ He leans over Roland’s desk. ‘No money, old lad. That’s the real threat to the Revolution. No money.’

  Roland nods. It doesn’t mean that he agrees.

  Danton glares down from his height. ‘I am meditating on a solution. We may . . . ’ – he glances round, as if checking that Fouché really isn’t there – ‘we may need a more radical solution.’

  Roland’s eyes widen in concern.

  Can it be? Appearing at the top of the stairs across the inn-yard, a man’s face, body, and for an instant Lucie knew that it was Greene.

  She’d been, as so often in the endless summer afternoons when the heat slumped like wet washing over St-Denis, sitting on a bench in the yard talking to one of the dogs.

  And as the dog shifted its head against her stroking, and nibbled at her wrist, she’d looked up to see the outline of a man growing and moving along the walkway and the light catching his face and then he was outside Greene’s door.

  But it wasn’t Greene, of course. Another man: not quite as tall as the Englishman, and thinner; and duller clothes.

  Lucie continued to watch from the shadows, her hands absently scratching the dog’s throat. The stranger stood in front of Greene’s door for a long time. Brown coat. Brown hair. He looked dusty somehow; and maybe the coat and the hair were greyer than brown.

  He didn’t seem worried, as he stood up there on the walkway. He didn’t even seem uncertain. He was just . . . waiting. He was somehow absorbing the scene around him, like he was breathing it – she thought she could see his shoulders rising and falling; she thought she saw his head shift to left and then to right, widening his perspective. What is he waiting for? What does he do? Absolutely still. He must be able to hear everything now. Even though he was looking the other way, Lucie Gérard knew that he was absorbing her, too; hearing her breaths from thirty paces away, smelling her, feeling her through his shoulders.

  The dog buried his snout in her thighs and snorted, and she took hold of the scruff of its neck and pulled up the head and bent to scold it. When she looked up again, the stranger was looking towards her.

  Towards her, then once around the whole inn-yard, head turning at the same even pace, and then he was back at Greene’s door and lifting the latch and he was in.

  From across the yard Lucie watched the empty doorway for a second, and then stood and hurried away.

  Roland and Fouché were sitting at the same desk. Fouché finished explaining a report. The minister signed two papers.

  ‘What else, Fouché? What else occupies that lively mind of yours?’

  Fouché smiles humility. ‘Just trying to keep the papers moving, Minister.’

  ‘Good. Yes.’ Roland scratches his nose. ‘You seemed . . . exercised by the deaths of La Porte and Collenot.’

  Fouché knows that Danton has prompted this. ‘I feel my way only, Minister. I mean no disrespect. I like things straight.’ Thin smile. ‘Everything in order.’ Roland winces. He knows Fouché is exploiting his preoccupations. ‘As Minister Danton very colourfully and rightly described, we face a set of diverse and powerful threats. External and’ – he straightens a paper, and says to it – ‘internal.’

  It sets Roland worrying. Most things did. ‘It’s true, Fouché. We know that there are British spies and provocateurs active in Paris. We know that Prussia is likewise active. I fear that too many of those who presently cooperate with us will at any moment prove fickle.’

  ‘Or false.’ Fouché looks up into Roland’s weary uncomfortable face. ‘When Collenot died on the guillotine, his provocations died with him. La Porte’s death gives no such certainty. Who can say what messages of sedition are still journeying across Europe, sent from his hand before he died? He was the centre of all intrigue, and’ – hesitation; Fouché is rarely fanciful – ‘his handwriting lives after him.’

  Again he adjusts the paper. A redundant gesture; Roland waits. ‘More than what he sent, Minister, I wonder at what he received.’ Fouché looks up from the paper; his eyes show life for once.

  After the stranger had disappeared into Henry Greene’s rooms, Lucie Gérard had on instinct walked away from the inn.

  Strangers. Men.

  Greene.

  She turned after fifty paces.

  She found Fessy the innkeeper in the kitchen, complaining to the cook. ‘Monsieur’ – quiet, near his shoulder; sometimes you had to be polite – ‘who’s the stranger in Greene’s rooms?’

  Fessy’s face was immediately bright behind his tiny glasses. ‘Ah, it’s the little princesse of the posts and the potions!’ His hand, shaking like fever, came up towards her cheek. Her eyes rolled; he wasn’t looking at her face anyway. ‘What’s he want, your father? Money or a bottle?’

  With a triumph of daring the innkeeper’s fingers touched her cheek, and instantly hurried away. ‘Who’s the stranger in Greene’s rooms?’

  ‘O-ho! Little Lucie wants information.’ Fessy’s face brightened again, and the round glasses emphasized the calculation; something to sell, something to gain. The face cooled. ‘There are many things that I could tell, little Lucie; but I don’t know if it would be worth it for me.’

  Inward sigh. She stepped closer, pulled out a handkerchief and with great deliberation brushed some flour off Fessy’s lapel. Her hand stayed there a moment. ‘There are many things that I could tell, Monsieur; tell Madame, or the gendos, and it would not be worth it for you either.’ And her eyes came up level with his.

  Always the big eyes for the men.

  He pushed her hand away; uncertainty; forced smile. ‘Another British. A friend of Monsieur Henry Greene.’ He overrode the question in her face. ‘He has a letter from Greene. Maybe he waits; maybe he leaves a message. He wants to see his friend Greene.’

  ‘We all want that.’

  Sniff. ‘Maybe he pays Monsieur Greene’s rent at last.’

  Her eyes narrowed. ‘Maybe he already has, eh?’ Fessy bridled. Her eyes wide, down; mumbled: ‘Thank you for your courtesy, M’sieur.’ And she walked out, gut twisting.

  Into Interior Minister Roland’s office slipped a secretary, a leather folder in his hands. The minister beckoned him to the desk. The secretary looked at Fouché, still sitting next to the minister and head down again; he continued to w
atch Fouché as he came closer to the desk and passed the folder to the minister.

  ‘Thank you, Raviot,’ Roland said.

  ‘Yes, thank you Raviot,’ Fouché said, and now he looked up, and smiled briefly. The others glanced at him. Raviot left, uneasy.

  Roland opened the folder, and the scrawls of police reports began to slither down towards his lap. He caught them, and laid the folder flat, and straightened the papers. A quiet sigh, mind full of France, and of Danton, and unable to discern any distinct words in the script of his police agents.

  A little cough. ‘You might have a look at these, dear Fouché.’ Fouché looks round, interested. ‘You seem to like this sort of thing. You have the mind and the patience for it.’

  ‘If I may serve, Minister . . . ’ Fouché’s eyes are already on the papers.

  ‘I have meetings,’ Roland says vaguely, and stands. Fouché is still in the papers.

  Roland watches him. ‘You’re a good man, Fouché,’ he says.

  Now Fouché is looking up, alert; uncertain.

  ‘This must seem a strange world to you – after Arras, after Nantes.’ The minister’s uncomfortable apology of a smile. ‘No longer the provinces, eh?’

  Still Fouché waits. He’s never known what to say on these occasions.

  ‘Not yet elected to the National Convention, and already we mark you for your discretion. Your assiduity.’

  Careful. ‘The minister is most kind. I am . . . not a man of passions, Minister. But I care for what we achieve now.’

  ‘Quite. Quite right.’ Roland fidgets, as if trying to remember the way to the door. ‘Well done.’

  Fouché murmurs something, and bows his head reverentially. Then he resumes his perusal of the police reports. Roland watches him for a last uncomfortable moment. Damn the man!

  DEPARTMENT 2

  St-Denis, the 6. of September

  A stranger is reported in St-Denis. He has been asking for Greene, known to this Department.

  He is staying at the Tambour, in the rooms of Greene. Greene has not been seen in the area for a little time.

  The stranger speaks to all who come to the Tambour. He has paid money to the owner and is ready to pay money to any who will give him information.

  The stranger is an Englishman, of average height, thin frame, pale complexion, by name Quienaire/Quienairde ???

  [SS K/1/X1/1 (AUTHOR TRANSLATION)]

  With this report, Fouché starts a new pile to one side of the desk, aligned with its bevelled edge. He takes a fresh piece of paper and writes on it ‘Greene, St-Denis’, then ‘Quienaire???, St-Denis’, and then he turns to the next report.

  Lucie Gérard stopped a step before the open doorway of Greene’s rooms at the Tambour.

  Lucie: the walking store of messages written and messages murmured; messages of love and threat and speculative investment in the saltpetre trade; things heard and things seen and things never spoken of.

  Down to her right, over the rickety balustrade of the walkway, the familiar inn-yard with the dog and the bench and the scattering of straw in the dust. Below her, her dirt-hemmed skirts and the toes of her boots and the boards beneath them, light-cracked. To her left, and just a step ahead, something unknown. A stranger, and a stranger was always a risk and a threat. But she had to know.

  She took a step forwards, and turned to the doorway.

  It was unsettling; it was alarming. Once again she found herself staring at the stranger’s back.

  He was standing in the middle of Greene’s living-room. Silent, gazing at – she couldn’t tell what he was gazing at; she didn’t even know if he was gazing. How long has he been standing here? Just his shoulders, rising and falling. The hair and the coat were indeed brown, but they seemed as thin as the body under them; faint, somehow.

  The shoulders stiffened.

  The head shifted to the right a fraction and down; following the movement, Lucie saw how her shadow lay over the table and onto the back wall. You have a moment to run.

  Slowly, the stranger turned.

  Thin face; high forehead; bony.

  A skull-face; a skeleton with no flesh on him.

  Dark eyes watching her; searching her.

  ‘Bonjour, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she said too loud. ‘M’sieur’ as an afterthought.

  He frowned, as if he didn’t know. She assumed it would be a lie.

  ‘I am a friend of Mr Greene. My name is Kinnaird.’

  He spoke French slowly; carefully; knowing limits.

  Lucie said: ‘We don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Mm. Pardon me, Mademoiselle: may I know your name?’

  ‘Lucie Gérard.’

  He made a little bow with his head.

  His eyes hadn’t moved from hers; hadn’t travelled down over her breasts and legs.

  A strange man.

  He stayed silent.

  She watched him sullenly.

  Silence didn’t seem to make him uncomfortable.

  ‘I take messages for him sometimes.’

  The face sharpened, tilted slightly. ‘Messages?’

  ‘My father is the apothecary, and sometimes he works as a copyist. I take messages – deliveries – for him. I take them for other people too.’

  He glanced at her boots, as if to confirm how worn they were. Then up again. She could feel him measuring her poverty. ‘Has Henry – Mr Greene – been gone long?’

  She shrugged. ‘Days. Week maybe?’

  ‘There are no signs that he fled.’ His eyes indicated the room around them. ‘He didn’t say anything? Didn’t give you a message?’

  She shrugged again. Shook her head. I have been in this room so often, but now the stranger seems to own it. Another shrug. ‘He was out often. Meeting people.’

  ‘People?’

  ‘People. You an English too?’

  The mouth opened in a smile; painful somehow – the skeleton showed through.

  ‘I am Scottish, Mademoiselle.’

  Fouché has come through mediaeval Paris to reach the Royal Arsenal. Through streets of cobblestones and shit, through districts where the slums have not been entirely replaced by newer, taller buildings. To the fortress itself, a squat thing of thick walls and no decoration, all grey, all stone. This had been a Paris of defensiveness, of uncertainty; a Paris not yet confident enough of the peace of France, nor of its status in that France, to spread beyond its own walls in elegance and prosperity.

  And in the heart of this mediaeval world, he has opened a small wooden door and found himself in a wizard’s cave. A wall of shelves holds nothing but jars, and in the jars he can see a hundred different powders and liquids, of every colour from dull lowering greys and browns to vivid yellows and blues that like poisonous reptiles warn of volatility and danger. Below the jars is a line of larger earthenware pots, their contents hidden from him. Every jar and pot is labelled, with fragile scratching script whispering names he cannot understand, the wizard’s ominous polysyllabic foreign gods. A board fills half of one wall, an enormous tabulation of abbreviations and endless lines of numbers. On the wooden benches that run along two walls and through the centre of the chamber there are marble slabs and wooden bowls and glass vessels and strange metal apparati. He looks instinctively for animal skulls, for snake skins, stuffed birds, strange herbs, deformities preserved in liquid and pentagrams on the floor.

  He doesn’t see them. The laboratory of Lavoisier is no cave, but the most modern room in the world. The two vast windows have let in the Enlightenment. Its wizard is humanity’s standard-bearer to the future, the most advanced mind of the age.

  He’s also, Fouché thinks, a swindling money-grabbing remnant of all that was worst about the royal regime: a tax farmer, a chiseller, a profiteer. He hoped to hide here, Fouché decides. Make himself the prophet of the new age, and hope we all forgot that he’d been the high priest of the old. Lavoisier the gunpowder-improver, Lavoisier the would-be education-reformer. No chance. Marat has denounced
Lavoisier for watering down tobacco, which is surely the least crime that any man in France is guilty of these days, but it’s funny what’ll get you into trouble now. And popular hatred of the tax farmers is vicious and unforgetting, and any excuse’ll do to kick the complacent man out on his arse.

  Fouché walks between the benches cautiously, wondering what clues about the future he’s supposed to see; wondering what hints of the old corruption might yet taint him.

  ‘Monsieur?’ A servant has appeared in the doorway. ‘You asked if there were any more documents, top of what he’d taken with him and what you’ve already got.’ Fouché waits patiently. The servant has something paper in his hand. ‘This letter came this morning. Porter didn’t know to say the Professor had already gone.’

  Fouché takes the letter, and a sheaf of calculations he’s found pinned to one of the benches, and a ledger from the back of a drawer. As he leaves, he looks uneasily at the board on the wall, wondering if it could be some sort of code, if he should have the whole thing unscrewed and carried out after him.

  ‘Ready, Ned?’

  ‘Never readier, old lad. Feel the blade at my neck already.’

  ‘Then you’ll move the quicker, I fancy.’

  Edward Pinsent looked down at the shadow beside the coach, then up at the stone wall beyond, and up, and up as it soared above them in the night.

  ‘This is La Force, by God!’

  ‘I do hope so, otherwise you’re not the coachman I need.’

  ‘La Force, Raph! God’s sake: this isn’t daring; it’s madness!’

  The shadow seemed to regather itself. ‘Brilliance, my dear fellow, though lesser men might easily confuse them,’ he said, but it was lost beneath Pinsent’s growl of irritation.

  ‘This is one of Hal Greene’s insane fancies, isn’t it? Something else he’s got fresh from London.’ Pinsent shook his head. ‘Damned easy to be brave when you’re boozing and fucking your way along Pall Mall.’

  ‘A bit of politics no doubt,’ Benjamin whispered; ‘but transformed by style, eh?’ He thrust up a piece of paper. ‘Take this, would you, old lad? Wouldn’t want them finding my aide memoire.’ Pinsent grabbed it, and stuffed it into his pocket.