Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  Lucie Gérard and Keith Kinnaird’s residence was framed by a pair of beech trees, three paces apart, with a rope strung between them at waist height; over this there were blankets and what looked to Kinnaird’s inexperienced eye like deer-skins, with loose branches and rocks holding them into a tent shape. There was a gap in one quarter of one side, presumably a blanket of satisfactory enough quality for the previous guests to have taken it with them.

  By unspoken assumption of competence, Lucie went off with some of Kinnaird’s purse to find supper. The price, for a loaf of bread and a sliver of cheese, was ludicrous. The economy of the France outside the law favoured those at the bottom of society: those who could bake, or hunt – or steal. And stolen food came expensive.

  They ate in silence, heads thick with weariness and the gloom. And then they dropped with the sun, wrapped in their clothes. Lucie watched Kinnaird as he settled, waiting for something. Then, uneasily, she lay down near him.

  Kinnaird’s eyes blinked in the darkness. He’d only slept out a few times in his life, and lingering uncertainty about the creatures of the French forests as well as his murderous neighbours kept his consciousness glimmering a little longer, amid his vast exhaustion.

  ‘Lucie,’ he murmured. ‘Why did you save me?’

  But she was asleep. In the small hours, the forest utter black and alive with tiny noises that seemed monstrous, he woke to find her against him, her back and rump against his chest and stomach, as if they were riding again. He lay there uneasily, reflecting on this, until he drifted into sleep again.

  When he woke with the dawn, she was gone.

  ALERT:

  to all MAGISTRATES loyal to the REVOLUTION, to all detachments of the NATIONAL GUARD, to all agents of policing and justice in FRANCE the NATIONAL CONVENTION seeks the testimony of M. XAVIER BONFILS

  sometime steward in the Royal Household of the former Kings of FRANCE. The said BONFILS may be reassured that he is not suspected nor accused of any crime against the REVOLUTION, but he has information vital to an investigation pertaining to the security and good order of FRANCE. Any loyal FRENCH CITIZEN who assists in the location of BONFILS and his rendering alive to any agent of authority of the REVOLUTION, is to be REWARDED. Once to hand, BONFILS is to be sent immediately with armed guard and all reasonable comfort to the OFFICE OF THE MINISTRY OF THE INTERIOR, PARIS.

  ROLAND

  Danton was a vast shadow looming over the Interior Minister. Danton was always a vast shadow looming over him. Roland sighed.

  ‘Dear Roland, if you want a new valet there must be an easier way to advertise.’ Danton flourished the paper and dropped it on the Interior Minister’s desk.

  Vaguely, uncomfortably, Roland had the sense that he needed to guard his words.

  ‘A formality.’

  Danton still loomed. ‘Really?’

  Roland shrugged. ‘There are . . . certain aspects, of . . . recent events that would benefit from a . . . fuller explication. The manoeuvres of Louis. His negotiations with his supporters – his foreign supporters.’

  Danton lowered his head, like a burden that strained him, until he could catch Roland’s eye. ‘The roads to every border are packed with the King’s retinue making for safety. The Maison du Roi was – what? A thousand officials? Two? The grandest aristos in France; the King’s closest advisors. And you’re hunting his butler?’

  ‘Fouché has the idea that – ’ Something like a growl came from Danton’s throat, his head down and dangerous like a bull’s; he reared, turned, and strode out of the room.

  Oh, the adolescent infamy of it: Sir Raphael Benjamin, breeches still awry, perched on the window sill and contemplating the drop into the darkness below. Don’t a man ever grow out of this?

  A gentleman’s experience of the world kept a part of his mind alert to sounds of alarum even when his conscious attentions were properly absorbed by a lady. In this case, they’d been properly and blissfully absorbed by certain intimate garments of the lady under consideration, and by the treasures therein. And still some part of his brain had heard a door slam and a shout, and somewhere in him a voice had said hallo . . . and he’d felt the lady stiffen, and he’d been up in an instant and considering the windows. A plunging kiss into her breasts, a rich kiss on her lips, something more genteel on her hand to mark the restoration of propriety and he was at the door and remembering where the stairs were beyond and trying to remember what happened at the bottom of them. As he opened the door the maid was right in front of him, a gasp of shock and the biggest bluest eyes and he pressed a finger to her lips and grabbed her shoulders and moved her aside. There was another shout downstairs, the sound of servants hurrying, and the stairs were no good now. Along the landing to where an open sash window beckoned to him, and he threw it fully up and tried clumsily to sling one leg over the sill. It wouldn’t go, and he wrenched his breeches into some kind of order and tried again. Athwart the sill and head in the night, he looked down into the darkness of . . . some yard? How far down? Something glimmered below him. Tiles on a roof or water in a puddle? He stuck his head back in.

  The maid was still watching him. Something flickered around her lips. Footsteps on the stairs behind her, and her expression became polite interest, and she suppressed a smile. Benjamin took a deep breath, blew her a kiss, ducked his head out and swung his other leg over and twisted and scrambled, got his hands gripping the sill for an instant then let himself drop. His feet hit roof, it held, he staggered and kept moving. Off the roof and keep moving, feet splashing and slithering through God knew what. He heard the sash shutting behind him, as he found a gate and slipped through into the world. A fifty-yard jog, a coin to an ostler, and he was up on his horse and away.

  Because one never knew, he took a similarly roundabout way back into his own rooms. For entry or exit, there are times when a gentleman needs a back door. In the case of the current premises, a back wall, a back privy roof, and a back window. Free from foolishness with maids and uncertainties, he was in through the window and laughing softly at the mad sport of it all before he saw the figure slumped in his good chair.

  Darker kick of guilt. The chair was turned away from the window; he couldn’t see a face.

  A mighty snore. Benjamin kicked at the nearest leg. ‘Get up, you oaf.’

  Ned Pinsent came awake with a grunt and a stare, glared at his host and settled back into a doze. A bottle of wine was on the table beside him, two thirds empty. ‘Breaking into mine was easier than buying your own, eh?’ Pinsent only grunted. ‘Blast your nerve.’

  Pinsent raised a heavy arm and extended a finger towards the far side of the table. ‘Lad brought that.’ A folded paper showed grey against the wood. ‘Didn’t say if it was from a lady or her husband.’

  It was a sealed packet, Benjamin’s name and his address here written on the outside.

  Inside was a separate paper, sealed, unaddressed. He broke into this one, and Pinsent watched his face as he read. Very deliberately, he released the paper and let it drop to the table.

  ‘All right, Raph?’

  Benjamin’s face was grim, and then it murmured a curse, unusual and vicious.

  Sir, I give you greeting from home.

  We have, I think, a mutual friend in St-Denis. He has, I fancy, on occasion involved you on our mutual behalf. We find that he is unlikely to be able to do so at the present moment, and so I take the liberty of communicating with you directly.

  It may suit us both were I not to detail any personal acquaintance between us, and to avoid the idle use of names in correspondence passed over uncertain ground in uncertain times. Suffice to say that, whether or not we have met, you and your particular – not to say distinguished – character are well known to me, as are your circumstances. I may mention how much I was struck by the boldness of your action in the matter of Lady L. S. and the Trinity Plate, and by your spirit of enterprise in Worcester in the spring of the year ’88.

  A gentleman of sporting instinct and unpinched boldness
is worthy indeed in these uproarious days, and might do good service were he to apply himself in a deserving cause. If I may particularize: as all thinking men continue to observe most closely the daily more remarkable developments in France, it has not gone unremarked that the authorities in Paris have set themselves to locate a man named Bonfils, formerly a servant in the entourage of the King. Now, it happens that there is an element here, all men of sober and patriotic sentiment, who would not be sorry should the French be thwarted in their aim.

  I recognize, dear Sir, that this proposal finds you in a moment of discomfort, not to say vulnerability, and I regret any suggestion of discourtesy in seeming to exacerbate your predicament or indeed to work upon it. Clearly, should your family’s efforts to preserve the general, and especially judicial, ignorance regarding certain past indiscretions prove unsustainable, it would place them in a more distasteful position at home, further disadvantage your own prospects here, and indeed serve sensibly to increase the fragility of your situation in France.

  I confide that you and our mutual friend would find yourselves natural allies in this affair, should you find him at all.

  I close by expressing my sincere regard for you, Sir, and for your continued good health.

  [SS 2/96/1]

  ‘What’s the Worcester and indiscretion stuff, Raph?’

  Pinsent had snatched at the letter before Benjamin could stop him.

  ‘None of your damned business, is what it is.’ Benjamin’s voice was distant.

  ‘I ain’t the only one who can’t get home so easy, is that it?’

  ‘Not at all, Ned, I adore this cesspit and I’m here for my health.’ No humour.

  ‘No names in the letter. These sound like the same outfit who had their hooks in Hal Greene.’

  Benjamin considered him a moment. Never wise to underestimate old Ned. ‘Yes, Ned, they do.’

  ‘Hal Greene who got us sent to La Force, and to that shambles in the square, and has now disappeared into the shadows to continue his chaos with greater freedom?’

  ‘He, Ned.’

  Pinsent was affecting indifference, but he was sitting up now, eyes open and earnest. ‘Which all goes to say: this’ll be a particularly damn-fool notion, then.’

  ‘It will, Ned.’

  Pinsent settled back into his chair, and avoided eye contact. ‘But, ah . . . You ain’t in a position to refuse, eh?’

  Fouché had schooled himself to pay attention to other men. However tiresome and fatuous they might seem – and most indeed were – he had come to realize that it served him to know their characters better: their pretended strengths and their weaknesses, their impostures, their desires. In schoolrooms, in small-town politics, and now in the National Convention of France, he marked the bullies and the milksops, the wooden virtues and the brittle dislikes, the ambitions and the fears. So now in the Convention chamber he ignored the sweating press of bodies to his left and right on the bench and leaned forwards, a pose of interest in the opinion of the representative from Ardèche, and a close attention to the man’s expensive coat and his assumption that the property of the individual was a truth that need not be debated or proven. Merely conventional, of course, but – a sudden acrid smell from somewhere near him; God, but I loathe the dumb herd habits of my fellow man – merely conventional, but the gentleman from Ardèche seemed oddly fragile in his insistence on the point.

  Knowledge is power; a paper or a man.

  Farther along the bench someone was shifting – stretching, or bending to murmur, or preparing to rise – and the movement rippled along to Fouché. He resettled himself between the shoulders either side of him, saw once again with distaste the ears of the man immediately in front of him, raised his gaze and scanned the hundreds of faces ranged around him in the chamber: sleeping – however that was possible in the crush and the bustle – staring, sweating, shouting. France is recreating herself in this place, and Joseph Fouché watches for the weak points.

  As his gaze reached the doorway, down and to his left, among the men standing in the gangway he saw Guilbert, staring deliberately in his direction.

  Eventually, the man from Ardèche ran out of steam, with a last celebration of the fact that in the new France the rights and estates of a man of virtue were no longer subject to the exactions of the clergy or the whims of corrupted ministers, and Fouché stood – I fancy, Monsieur, that the prospect of a parcel of land or a lawsuit would quite overmaster you – and shuffled his way through the press of legs to the aisle.

  He found Guilbert in the corridor. ‘I hope you will judge the intrusion worthy, Monsieur.’ Fouché said nothing. ‘This: a letter has just arrived at the rooms in St-Denis previously occupied by the fugitive Greene and then by the fugitive Kinnaird. In English, addressed to Greene although the letter itself uses no names. It encourages him to obstruct our hunt for the royal servant Bonfils.’

  A little thrill: ‘He is significant after all, Guilbert, that little steward!’

  ‘Of course, Monsieur.’ It was a nice flattery, and Fouché enjoyed it.

  ‘So significant that the English want to stop us getting to him. What might he know, that the English are so desperate?’

  Guilbert stayed silent. Guilbert did not deal in what men might know, but in the facts he persuaded them to tell him.

  Then something else. Once again, the shadow of something shapeless and unsettling. ‘But these English, Guilbert . . . They know what concerns us, and – How do they know, indeed? And – ’

  ‘From our alert for the man Bonfils, as I guess.’

  ‘So they have agents – within France – who notice such things, and who judge immediately their interest in the matter, and who act. Act, Guilbert! Judgement, decision, instruction.’ His eyes were bright. ‘It is admirable that, Guilbert.’

  ‘They don’t know we’re reading their letters, Monsieur. That’s not so admirable.’

  Theodor did not enjoy his trips to the market for Meister Karl. He was a man of the Pomeranian plains, and the endless over-soaring maze of the Paris streets felt like constant suffocation. He’d roamed Europe with the army, until the explosion of a cannon had ruined him, and took the view that cities were to be looted and burned and nothing more. He prowled the lines of stalls, careful of his feet on the pulp-slicked cobbles, careful of the hands that might reach for his purse. Even the women were less fun in the cities; paint and cheap tricks and nothing to get a hold of.

  He knew the items he wanted in the market; he would find the best quality available for those items; and he would leave. No extravagance, no loitering. He walked the square once, to know the options. Reconnaissance.

  Good fruit, the French had. And they were good traders. He’d never campaigned in France; the foraging and the requisitioning would have been good sport. But he didn’t like them, for men. He wondered how they fought.

  Two pheasant there; they would satisfy. Immediately he was in front of the stall, pointing. A fat woman next to him began to protest; he ignored her. The merchant sized him up, liked the look of something unfamiliar about his face or dress, and said a price. Theodor shrugged, pointed to his ear, shook his head. The man flashed a handful of fingers three times. Without gesture or hesitation Theodor found ten sous and handed them over. He didn’t demean himself by bargaining with these people. Delighted to have got more than five, the trader had the birds tied and over Theodor’s basket arm in half a minute, and Theodor was turning away.

  He felt the unnatural movement against his coat; sensed the body behind him.

  The cannon had ruined Theodor’s hearing, but thirty years of soldiering had forged muscles and sinews that would never slacken. Rather than turning, he first reached his right hand under his left shoulder until he found the ferreting palm and gripped it fierce, pinching until even he heard the scream, and now he was turning, to his left, swinging basket and arm against whoever was behind him.

  The whoever was a boy, now sprawling among the cabbage leaves and chicken shit. The boy gap
ed up at him, and then nodded wide-eyed towards the basket.

  Theodor looked down, and saw the slip of paper now stuffed against his cabbage. He looked back, and nodded once, and the boy scrabbled away over the cobbles and up.

  Theodor brushed the paper, but did not open it, before handing it to Meister Karl. ‘Im Markt.’ He left the Meister to it.

  Arnim nodded, and opened the paper. It was a printed proclamation from the Interior Minister, seeking a former royal servant named Xavier Bonfils. Scrawled in ink across the bottom corner was a single word: non.

  Fouché’s pleasures, such as they were, had always been of the mind; never of the flesh, or the chase. Seeing at last the pattern in a Latin conjugation, that was exciting. Assembling the chain of argument to overmaster his opponent in the seminary, that was thrilling. The other things smacked of loss of control; he left them to the beasts.

  Then he’d seen something in Guilbert’s face, as he’d set off on the trail of the royal servant Bonfils. Guilbert, who had always been congenial because of his reserve, his phlegmatism. Suddenly there’d been a bustle about this steady man, and something shining in the dead eyes. Impassive implacable Guilbert had been excited, because he was hunting something. Even though he had no conception of the importance of what he was hunting: of the answers that might be given by the man he hunted; of the enormous significance if his prey did have information about the royal correspondence.

  Fouché felt his own intellectual stimulations blending with the hunt. Roland had told him of a great Prussian diplomatist and spy, thought to be active in Paris. He himself was beginning – by the exercise of his logical intellect – to explore the network of British emigrés and their activities. And now he found himself . . . in a competition with these men. In a race.

  Roland’s summary: the Prussian; and that office of the British crown, anonymous and ancient.

  He rarely thought of what Guilbert actually did, to produce his results. He found it hard to imagine these other men, the foreigners. But he knew them for obstacles to his own success – for rivals, and he would not be beaten.