Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  The Minister of the Interior’s eyes widened, and they gazed bleak: alarm; disapproval. He placed his knife and fork down on his plate. Then he frowned at Fouché, stood, frowned again, retreated to the wall watching Fouché over his shoulder all the time, seemed to reflect, walked to the table again and sat. And again frowned.

  The Minister’s tongue explored his lips. ‘Ah . . . If, Fouché, I knew your interest . . . ’

  Fouché’s mind was grappling with the Minister’s performance. How much can I not know? Is there still so much secret, even from me?

  How, then, to present my interest? ‘A concern at . . . at the threat, Minister. Louis was known to have correspondence with the courts of Europe. After the Revolution first began to bring him under proper control, he no doubt corresponded in a treasonous manner, to invite foreign action against the Revolution. No doubt he received replies; perhaps he kept copies of his own letters. Such correspondence would show not only his treasons but also his . . . were there any . . . his intermediaries in France.’

  Interior Minister Roland had survived a long political life, and a tumultuous change of regime. He chose not to answer.

  Is it me? Of what can I be suspected?

  ‘Hence my question, Minister.’

  The Minister’s tongue made another patrol of his lips.

  Or, if I am not suspect . . . ?

  ‘Nothing was found, Fouché.’

  ‘That’s – that must have been disappointing, Minister.’

  The Minister’s eyes, normally so benign, were cold.

  ‘Indeed. Naturally there was great interest. As you say – the question of Louis’s corruptions and betrayals.’

  It was all too bewildering. ‘So . . . So it is thought destroyed, Minister? Burned?’

  ‘We must assume so. A most natural proceeding.’

  ‘I ask, Minister, because several persons connected to the royal correspondence have recently died or disappeared. It seems to indicate some . . . unfinished affair.’

  Silence.

  Why would the Revolution’s Interior Minister be so wary about the King’s correspondence?

  ‘But there was nothing . . . ’ Carefully, Roland shook his head.

  Because the Revolution’s Interior Minister was previously the King’s Interior Minister.

  The door opened behind the Minister again, and Madame Roland was at the table before either of the men was halfway stood. She waved them down again. ‘I shall see my friend out, Roland, and then I shall retire for the night.’ The Minister murmured acknowledgement. ‘Goodnight to you, Monsieur Fouché.’ Out came the hand and he grabbed at the fingers, thrilling at the touch of their tips. ‘We are grateful for your company.’

  He had half-stood again; ‘Madame.’

  She smiled soberly at him, and bent to kiss the side of her husband’s head, and Fouché gazed down the shadowed tunnel between her breasts. I am not a child! I have a wife; this is not unknown ground. So why does this female trouble me?

  As the door started to close again, Fouché caught a glimpse of Madame Roland’s guest making for the front door. Just a glimpse of the back of her head, hair up and an exposed upper back.

  Somehow, the hair and the back seemed fami- Control yourself!

  Emma Lavalier closed her bedroom door behind her, and pressed her body back against it.

  The world shut out. She would even do without Colette’s gentle fingers for her toilette.

  Colette had prepared the room: the bed ready, the curtains drawn. The hem of the curtain shutting off the bay window was rippling faintly; Colette had opened the window. The idea of cool – the prospect of the sheets against her body – felt like relief.

  There was something wrong with the bay curtain: it didn’t hang true; it . . . bulged slightly, halfway down.

  She pressed harder against the door, fingers stiff and strained. She tried to see through the curtain.

  She should get out. She should summon the servants.

  She took a great breath, and it trembled like a sob.

  Increasingly I must face my sins alone.

  She started walking towards the curtain, her steps measured and counted and bringing her closer to another unavoidable confrontation.

  Another breath, and then she wrenched the curtain aside.

  Raph Benjamin was sitting on the window-sill, back against the frame and one leg propped up. Lavalier swallowed her gasp, her thumping heart.

  ‘’S the trouble with the Revolution,’ he said, ‘plays havoc with morality.’

  ‘I’ve all the control I want over my morality, thank you.’ She cupped his jaw between her thumb and forefinger. ‘If I want you I shall summon you.’ She scratched softly at his cheek.

  Affected amusement at this. The voice came harder: ‘Our encounters are become rather furtive, dear Emma.’

  ‘You never used to complain at privacy, Raphael.’

  The old grin. ‘Private I like. Private I encourage. But furtive is different. Furtive is merely undignified.’

  He was right. She was becoming more . . . cautious, was it?

  ‘If I may, Emma, one of your charms – one of your very many charms – has always been your readiness to enjoy life. To . . . to embrace it.’ Rogue’s smile.

  ‘And you life personified.’ She said it flat. ‘Benjamin, if you propose to review my lost charms like a fat grocer in a brothel, we may end this encounter now – furtive or otherwise.’

  Colder smile. ‘Even so.’

  She shrugged. ‘Life seems . . . more serious.’

  Should she just satisfy him? To shut him up, to prove him wrong, to restore his hope in life. To restore her own.

  No, not even for that.

  ‘I was at Roland’s house this evening. The Minister of the Interior.’

  ‘I have heard of him.’

  ‘Calling on his wife, at least. He was having supper with a colleague. A young man named Fouché. He is Jean-Marie Roland’s latest cultivation: a tiger of the Revolution.’

  ‘And what creature of revolution are you, dear Emma?’ There was admiration in his voice nonetheless.

  ‘I overheard this Fouché asking about the royal correspondence. Apparently they didn’t find any.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘You don’t think that’s interesting?’

  ‘Burned it all, presumably.’

  ‘And if they didn’t?’ Benjamin shrugged. ‘There’s nothing that would . . . would worry you, Raph?’

  ‘Ah, my billets-doux to dear Queen Marie, you mean? Messages of support to His Majesty from me and all my Prussian friends? No, there’s nothing of that – ’ He hesitated open-mouthed, and then brought his lips together and whistled a few notes of a tune. ‘But good old Greene, now . . . Surely not. Surely that’s out of his league.’ He picked up the tune again. Lavalier watched the face, watched the mind working. Watched fondly. ‘But if the revs are interested in ripe letters, now . . . ’ The tune again for a few notes, slower, and flatter. ‘What’s the name of that Dutchman of yours? Rumours about him and the Prussians. Pleasant fellow. Dull.’

  ‘Oh – Marinus.’ She smiled. ‘I like to see you scheming.’

  The rogue’s smile again, and his eyes searched her body. ‘And that little compliment is all the warmth I may expect tonight?’

  A brief sigh, and she bent down, and kissed him full on the lips; his hands came up to her body. Then she began slowly to push him off the window-sill into the night.

  The paper system of the revolutionary Ministry of the Interior was that inherited from the royal Ministry of the Interior, except that some – though not all – of the men who guarded it had gone. Fouché had approached it ready with justifications and ploys, and found that no one objected to him simply looking at whatever he fancied. Or indeed taking it.

  Looking at it was easy. It was everywhere: piles and dossiers and crates of papers, in different rooms of three different buildings. The successive political upheavals and the constant changes in staff, in pri
orities, and indeed in the whole structure of the state had meant a series of abortive attempts at reorganization. Fouché spent a dispiriting morning wandering angry between ministry buildings and former ministry buildings, and even to the Assembly archives in the Convent of the Feuillants, looking in each for the more established porters who could tell him where the documents were. Occasionally he would find some. The royal paperwork had become as fugitive as the royal family, huddling for shelter in diverse grand buildings; and trying, as it seemed to Fouché, not to be noticed.

  Roland saw his frustration. ‘Your documents, Fouché?’

  ‘Minister. It’s absurd. The most elaborate administration in Europe, and the most luxuriant, and all traces of it have disappeared.’

  Roland shrugged sympathetically, and turned to go.

  Then he said, ‘It may have been destroyed, you know?’ Fouché looked doubtful. ‘I recall that we had record of one – no, two – incidents. The King gave some documents to the American ambassador and the ambassador destroyed them; we had a man who saw it. And our investigations of the chaos at the Tuileries showed that some documents were given to Madame Campan, and she also destroyed them.’

  Fouché considered it. Another lesson, perhaps. Should he rely on men, not papers?

  But he didn’t trust the men.

  ‘Americans, Minister?’

  ‘Another factor in your calculations, dear Fouché. But our revolutionary allies.’

  Fouché scowled. ‘Unless the ambassador and the woman Campan left with a suite of wagons, what they later destroyed must surely be incidental. The royal correspondence must have been vast.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Roland said, trying to care. ‘And yet . . . ’

  ‘You are the British, who lodges at the Tambour?’

  It was muttered, flat, and like an accusation. Kinnaird found himself checking a second time that the man wore no uniform, looking beyond him.

  He nodded, some ancestral prudence making him think he could more easily pretend a misunderstanding if he hadn’t actually said anything.

  ‘I have a message for you; a rendez-vous.’ Kinnaird’s eyes widened. He managed to turn the expression into disinterested enquiry. ‘Tomorrow. Ten of the morning. The shop of Petiot in the Galerie Marillac.’

  Kinnaird nodded again. And now he had to speak. ‘Who? Who am I to meet?’

  Now the young man looked quickly either side of himself. ‘Another British: Henry’ – the H was uncomfortable for the French mouth – ‘Greene.’

  A garbled French pronunciation of the so-mysterious words. For a third time Keith Kinnaird nodded; slowly now, fate and his heart thumping hard.

  Pieter Marinus’s house was anonymous: narrow, its three floors apparently failing to shoulder their way between the two more substantial buildings either side, and just off the rue Martin. The anonymity had perhaps been an unconscious choice; the proximity to the Porte St Martin and a fast way out of the city had been deliberate.

  He had the key in the lock when he sensed someone near him, shifted his eyes to catch movement, heard ‘You are Monsieur Marinus?’ He looked at the speaker. Time to get into the house? Time to run? Drop the key, or throw it? A lad. Poor. Dull-faced. He looked beyond the lad – saw no one – scanned the street around him, trying to catch movement in windows, figures in doorways.

  The key stayed in the lock, unturned. Marinus held his hand up near it, ready to strike or push out or to get inside.

  ‘I am Pieter Marinus.’

  The lad didn’t seem impressed. ‘Message for you, Monsieur. You’re asked to a meeting tomorrow, ten of the morning. The shop of Petiot in the Galerie Marillac. The message is from a British named Henry Greene.’

  Marinus felt his stomach lurch. He fought to control his expression, fought to stand still, urged his mind to think.

  He nodded.

  The lad stood there. Sniffed.

  Marinus placed a coin in the lad’s hand, and the lad considered it, and shrugged, and turned away.

  Fouché was at his desk. The desk was covered with papers. Not covered completely – for the papers were organized in precise piles, precise in the congruity of each pile and in its relation to the adjacent piles. Occasionally he would, by way of experiment, move a paper from one pile to another. Sometimes, when he felt that his mind needed refreshing, he would transpose the positions of two piles, adjusting their relation to the others.

  Guilbert was through the door before Fouché had properly registered his knock, and Fouché looked up startled, as if caught in a secret.

  Guilbert’s haste was unusual, though his voice of course was flat.

  ‘Your pardon, Monsieur.’ Fouché nodded, as if this pardon were actually a transaction. ‘A detail from the Commune.’ Fouché nodded again. ‘As you know, the Commune police have their informants and their spies. They mostly inherited them from the Prefect of Police, which means they were informants and spies under the King too.’

  ‘Trade must continue, Guilbert.’

  ‘Right you are, Monsieur. I know your concern for the affairs of foreigners, Monsieur. You spoke of rumour of Prussian business in the city. So I keep in touch. The Commune police have an eye on the house of a Dutchman – once suspected of intrigue with the Prussian embassy, before it closed – and yesterday they saw a messenger stop there. The messenger is one of their occasionals. Why get paid for a message once when you can get paid for it twice?’ Fouché nodded. ‘He’d delivered the same message to an Englishman. Invitation to a meeting.’ Fouché felt his impatience beating in him. ‘The invitation came from Henry Greene, the man seen outside the Meuble when it was being burgled.’

  The street was a chaos of noise and movement and dust, and Kinnaird stepped through it uneasily. All shops in this district, and stalls filled the street between them, and his vision was bright with fruit, and the fat rich smell of fruit swirled round him, ripening too fast in the summer heat; from every stall and shop-front someone was yelling his variety and his quality and his price, like so many rival church bells, and Kinnaird’s ears rang with this competition of excellence and the bubbling of voices around him in their unfamiliar language. As an exercise in commerce he wondered at it; made some comparisons, some calculations.

  He stepped and slipped through apple cores and half-tasted peaches and discarded leaves and orange peel and spat-out plum stones and an ooze of slops that glistened on the cobbles and were sticky under his boots. Ahead the dust was worse, and he saw workmen with aprons and a scaffold of timbers against one side of the street, other men on ladders, a bustling of buckets and pulleys. There was a splash beside him and a curse, as one of the fruit-sellers tried to damp down the dust around his stall and glared hopelessly at the building works. Kinnaird stepped forward quickly as the slick of water reached his boot.

  A workman came staggering past with a bucket of water, and another following lazily, and Kinnaird stopped him to ask for the Galerie Marillac; he had to ask twice, shouting, and the man pointed beyond the works. Kinnaird skirted the bedlam of activity, watching the workers, appraising them as he’d appraised the stores. The dust was sticking to the liquids on his boots now. There was a tavern to his right. He could smell cheap wine and hot grease.

  The Galerie was an elegant entrance of fake columns, and through it a flagstoned hall and a wooden staircase. Beside the staircase a man was slumped against the wall, but straightened as Kinnaird hesitated beside him. Kinnaird said, ‘Petiot?’ and the man gestured up the stairs with his thumb.

  ‘You are Monsieur Marinus?’

  Kinnaird stopped, foot on the first step. ‘No.’ Suddenly the sense of his isolation, the need to be innocent of whatever Henry Greene was doing. ‘No, my name is Kinnaird.’ The man frowned at the unusual word, and relapsed against the wall.

  Halfway up the staircase turned back on itself, and the noise of the street dropped. Kinnaird heard his boots on the boards; heard their creak.

  At the top of the stairs, silence. A passage stretching to left and r
ight of him, a line of perhaps a dozen frontages, each a single-room premises that would also look out onto the street. Above some of the frontages there were signboards: Chapeaux; Dusollier & Fils; Société Bretagne. Among the fils and frères he looked for Petiot.

  The arcade seemed deserted. Not completed? So why the signboards already there? He took a step to the right. Through the window of Dusollier & Fils he saw shelves, all dusty, and a low cupboard adrift in the centre of the shop. He walked on.

  An eruption of noise behind him, and he turned fast. A man had stepped out of one of the frontages, with a saw and a short length of wood and a fat laugh directed back into the shop. The man started down the stairs.

  Kinnaird watched him go, and turned forwards again. Again the silence, though now he could distinguish through it the sounds of the work from outside, and from behind him, through the unclosed door, the carpenter’s mate hammering at something.

  Ahead, at last, was Henry Greene.

  Now he saw the name ‘Petiot’ painted elaborately over the next doorway but one.

  Through the smeared window next to him, he could see the workmen on their scaffold, repairing the wall around the window space and installing a window frame. Through the glass, and the silence, they seemed far away. Their world was distant, and boisterous. His was not.

  He came level with the premises of Petiot, took a breath, and looked through the window panes.

  It was empty.

  Another abandoned shop space, dusty boards and racks of shelves. The street window in the place had shutters, closed except where one panel hung loose on a solitary hinge and let the day in. Among the ghostly residue of Petiot’s business, the beam of daylight caught a chair left in the middle of the floor and scorched it silver.

  Kinnaird hesitated, and found himself about to knock.

  He frowned, and tried the handle. Stepped inside. Frowned again, and closed the door behind him.

  He walked the perimeter of the room, considering it as a commercial premises. Its capacity; the quality of the woodwork; the location; the light.