Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

‘Royalist conspiracy. They fell out. Bonfils couldn’t live with the fact that he’d ruined the whole – ’

  ‘I heard – ’

  That would do, Benjamin thought. Surely the evil string-pullers in London would be happy enough. Thwart the French in their aim, the message had said. Dead was surely thwarted enough.

  He wondered who the other man had been.

  ‘This does not help us, Guilbert.’

  ‘I regret that, Monsieur. My approach could have been dif-’

  Fouché was talking over him. ‘We learn, Guilbert.’ Jumped up, Guilbert was thinking, but the ideal man to work for. A hard-working man could go a long way working for a man like this. ‘There is frustration in this outcome, but also we draw something from it: with such interest in the man Bonfils, we know that he was significant. We know that there is more to learn. Somehow, we must learn the secret that he fled to protect. Now!’ – he straightened the paper in front of him – ‘what of the other man?’

  ‘Your pardon, Monsieur. I think this the more interesting point.’ Fouché waited. ‘Markings in his clothes, and a letter in his pocket, suggest it was the Englishman Greene. Henry Greene.’

  ‘Greene?’ Fouché’s eyes widened. ‘The agent? Now that’s too tidy, Guilbert!’ He hesitated. ‘Bonfils killed him?’

  ‘Difficult to know, Monsieur. The body was not lately dead.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Difficult to know. I have seen bodies, Monsieur’ – the understatement came flat as ever – ‘but it is impossible to know. A physician could say more.’

  ‘Wait, Guilbert . . . ’ Guilbert waited. Fouché’s eyes had narrowed again, the hawk circling. ‘How are we sure that it is this Greene? A set of clothes, a letter . . . ’ Guilbert nodded. ‘Could someone who knew him identify him for us?’

  ‘If you can find someone you trust, Monsieur. And the face had . . . suffered.’ Fouché looked uncomfortable. ‘From his lodgings it is known that the man Greene had visited a surgeon within the last month, who pulled a tooth. We will find the surgeon and he will examine the teeth. It is a good method.’

  Fouché nodded. It was a good method, and he marked it as something else he had drawn from the day. Still his hands flexed and unflexed under the table, frustrated at the many things he still did not grasp.

  ORDINARY REPORT

  Department of Haut-Marne

  18. October 1792

  Meaux; routine check on inn Rose, known to be visited by Royalist sympathisers. Recent residents as follows:

  night of the 13th – Juppet B., Bezieres P. (priest?);

  night of the 14th – none registered;

  night of the 15th – Bezieres, M. & Mme Dunay Th. (questionable – liaison);

  night of the 16th – Jacques (surname not known), Bonfils X., Valery H.;

  night of the 17th – Valery H., Lepin H.

  Boy reported a foreigner active in the inn, night of the 17th, asking questions. Under questioning, landlord admitted this was Kinnaird, K. (name circulated in Ministry Bulletin nr 78), travelling Paris-Montmirail.

  [SS K/1/X1/12] (AUTHOR TRANSLATION)

  Danton was in with Minister Roland – Roland referred to such visits as Danton’s orbit, his measured tour of the sphere of the Revolution to show his light – when Fouché pushed unbidden through the connecting door.

  Fouché chose to come, and chose to push through unbidden, precisely because he knew Danton was there. ‘Minister!’ He said, urgency and determination, and then affected to notice Danton and offered him a generous bow and kept going towards Roland’s desk and kept speaking. ‘An immediate order for your consideration.’

  Though he did not shift his focus from Roland, Fouché thought he could physically feel Danton’s unease. He pressed on. ‘I am uncomfortable, to be honest, Minister. I know you prefer to go slowly; I know you do not like these determined measures.’ It was an understatement. The words ‘immediate order’ had soured and paled Roland’s face, and he’d pulled back from their manifestation on his desk. ‘Naturally I prefer that hope and patience alone may protect us. But for duty I am obliged at least to offer you the possibility of this measure to protect the Revolution.’

  ‘Come now, Fouché! Surely poor Roland doesn’t need – ’ But Roland’s hand had come up and Danton had stopped, and Fouché was fighting to suppress his delight. And now Danton saw his mis-step.

  ‘Dear Fouché,’ Roland said, stiff with dignity, ‘I have nothing against determination and speed when wisely guided.’ Fouché’s words had been a calculated chance at prodding Roland to action. Danton sticking his head in was a guarantee of it. ‘You are concerned for the Revolution?’

  And now Danton couldn’t risk interfering again.

  ‘The Revolution does not panic, Minister. But I don’t like this recent development. Foreign agents have murdered a French citizen simply because he was the object of an enquiry by your office, with the aim of thwarting our investigation. The English are clearly implicated somehow in these affairs: the outrage at the Garde-Meuble; the murder. Perhaps I sounded melodramatic earlier: perhaps it is only prudence that we give ourselves the possibility, within the law, of investigating the most dubious of the foreign residents.’

  Roland kept his eyes on Danton, said ‘Prudence indeed!’ and signed.

  Ned Pinsent was half-asleep in his chair, eyes somewhere between the picture on the mantelpiece and another world, when his door started thundering. Three knocks – fists – against it and the catch was shuddering. He jolted forwards in the chair, gaped at the door, half stood, and again the thundering. He took a deep breath, and a step forwards, and was reaching for the pistol when the door crashed in and there were muskets in the gap and uniforms pushing through behind.

  By the time Raphael Benjamin had made it back to St-Denis his satisfaction had shrunk. The death of Bonfils would presumably keep Greene’s London shadow-men happy, but it didn’t feel like much of an achievement. And after several groin-numbing days in the saddle he was tired and bad-tempered, and cursing London and Paris and the various places where he’d been forced to spend the last few days.

  He stomped through the open front door, aware of the effect of his dirty boots on the tiles, and sure enough there was a loud ‘Oh!’ squeaked out nearby. He hesitated, weighing sarcasm and knowing he was too tired to be polite. He glanced to the side towards the noise, down at his boots and the smear behind them, and back up at the noise. The landlady was standing in the little parlour from where she always spied on the world, and staring at him. ‘You’re here!’ she added.

  ‘I’m here,’ Benjamin said, unable to think of anything to add.

  ‘You’re . . . you’re welcome.’ She said. ‘As always.’ And she smiled.

  It was the most bewildering aspect of the journey. He spent a moment trying to absorb the phenomenon of a pleasant landlady, shook his head and made for the stairs.

  And stopped.

  Something different is something wrong. He took two paces backwards, and ducked round into the passageway towards the back of the house. ‘You’re not going to your room, Monsieur?’ came from behind him.

  ‘I’ll take a piss in the yard, Madame,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Better than doing it out of your window as usual, eh?’ Into the yard, he glanced around the squalid space and made for the gate in the back wall – head down, suppressing the urge to look up at his window. He pulled at the gate; it wouldn’t move. A shout somewhere behind him, muffled, and his hands were on top of the gate and he vaulted up onto it and down the other side and heard the sash rattling up and as he touched the ground and crouched with the momentum there was an explosion behind him and something thumped into the gate. He scrambled away along the alley, head tucked low and feeling his shoulders broad and exposed.

  More alone than he had ever been, lost in an outlaw forest somewhere in the middle of a land in chaos, Keith Kinnaird – merchant, sometime Secretary of the Warriston Philosophical Society – stared into the darkness and considered his
life.

  He’d always considered himself a solitary man: courteous, but not sociable. Independent. Taking nothing; expecting nothing. More than twenty years he had made his own way in the world.

  He’d always considered himself an outsider. A changeling to the couple who’d raised him, and who grieved for the history of rebellion and shame that he represented. A restless soul, fighting the shopkeeper’s eternal urge to conform. A man who had to trade to eat, in a world built on money but affecting to despise it. A Scot, in an English universe.

  And France had seemed to offer so much. Henry’s letter had seemed so enticing. The chance to use his talents, in a society recreating itself with unprecedented freedoms. He’d never had much use for fraternity, and equality had always seemed an illusion; but what might not be possible for a Keith Kinnaird, given liberty?

  And now he looked around the forest, this place of perfect liberty.

  For centuries, Scots had looked to the wildernesses for their freedom. And here in this wilderness he saw what that freedom meant. Desolation; desperation; barbarism. Humans become animals, in the heart of the most civilized country on earth. It was the corrupted betrayed embloodied freedom of the Wallace, of the great Montrose, of MacDonald of Glencoe, of the abandoned victims of the ’45. The same promise of a dream: your own land; your own life to live; true freedom. And the same nightmare in the end: families pale and starving and hunted, hiding in the bracken, trying to live off nuts and berries, so eternally cold and wet, hoping feverishly to hide away for ever from human society.

  Then he wondered at the dependencies of men on other men. He felt first his vulnerability, his weakness: how very frail he seemed, how foolish, compared to the man Aucun – compared even to Lucie. He’d always found himself composed, whatever the challenge. Now that felt a silly little pride; vanity only. He was alienated, adrift and afraid.

  Something began to whisper in the wind above him, and the few leaves still on the trees whispered it back. The whispering became drops of rain, spattering the undergrowth.

  He was nothing.

  Kinnaird felt the first drops on his face, saw a picture of himself with a muddy trickle rolling down one cheek.

  Here. Now. This, after all, is who I am.

  And something else:

  I live yet. The Scottish nation, all its mercantile strength, was born of slum-bairns and mud-washed fugitives. And if I can live in this, what might not be possible?

  Edward Pinsent was not an obliging prisoner of the Revolution, and somewhere this glowed in him as a point of pride. Somewhere deep inside – somewhere instinctive, for he had made no conscious decision to resist.

  He’d had a few years of schooling, two decades or more back, until father and schoolmaster had decided that no one was benefiting from the transaction. Now, discomfort and tiredness and loneliness and hopelessness had stripped away those decades of life and experience, and revealed the stubborn bewildered schoolboy Pinsent at their core. Solidity his only characteristic, and endurance his only resistance, against the endless protests and punishments at his failure to be more courteous, more obedient, more prompt with his answers.

  Questions always startled him; made him clam up. He retreated inside, until the thrashing was over.

  The cell was damp, and no light came in through the grille high in one corner; but he had it to himself mostly, and he’d kept a bundle of straw dry enough to sit on.

  He wasn’t counting hours, or days. They would pass, somewhere outside him. They always would.

  Fuck the pluperfect tense.

  The door rattled loud, and swung in, and lamplight caught one and a half eyes gleaming in the gloom.

  ‘Up and out, old ox!’

  Pinsent levered himself upright against the wall, suppressing the groan and the strain it cost him, and turned his back and undid his breeches and began to piss into the bucket.

  ‘Get a bloody move on! Nice day out. Someone to talk to.’ A hand pulling at his shoulder. He shook it off, half-turned, and contrived to piss on the nearest boot. ‘Oh, f-’ and the back of a hand caught him across the mouth and his head smacked against the wall.

  He stumbled up the two steps into the corridor, doing up his breeches and chuckling. At the top, the usual ritual. The manacles appeared in front of him; he lunged forward to knock them away; the guards pulled him back; musket barrel into his back and then he let his hands be chained. The guards laid hands on his shoulders to push him along, and he shook them off and walked anyway, and they were used to it now and let him. Faces lunged forwards into door-grilles and bars as he passed, fingers clutching and straining, and he nodded to them all. ‘I give you good day, Madame.’ ‘Dear Sir, I trust you are feeling a little better.’ ‘My respects to you, dear Doctor.’ ‘Ah, Mademoiselle, you tempt me as always.’

  When there was no one to talk to, his face closed again, dirt and stubble and two bruises and a half-closed eye. Up more stairs, and another corridor, and then out into the courtyard and he winced and shied at the light. The guards had to steer him towards the archway. The relief of shadow again, and jovial comment from one of the sentries at the gate, and he told him to bugger off, and there was rattling, and the gate swung open and they pushed him through and the gate clanged shut again. Ahead he could see a coach, fringed with daylight at the end of the archway. Somewhere inside he registered that a coach rather than a cart meant no execution today. Somewhere inside he registered that the coach meant another interrogation.

  A shove and he stumbled forwards, and pulled himself up straight and walked towards the coach. Simple black business, four-wheeled and cheap. Closed coach. No one wants to see Pinsent on Founder’s Day. A guard pulled the door open in front of him, another shove from behind, and he growled and reached his chained hands up for the frame and pulled himself up and in.

  And then a shot, and a shriek of alarm from the horse, and the beast must have reared for the coach went swaying and twisting and Pinsent stumbled to his knees in it; behind him shouting, the guards were starting to – and then another shout, ‘Escape! Stop him!’ – and slumped against the seat he saw a figure race past the open doorway behind him and now the guards were turning and moving uncertainly after it.

  Then the roadside door of the coach opened in front of him, and in the blinding daylight there were horses and a figure and ‘Up you get, Ned! Jump to it, you idle sod!’ And he was scrambling up and through the door and falling into place on the horse and immediately the beast lunged forwards and away and he was clinging on.

  Half a mile later Pinsent came fully conscious again, properly registered the man on the horse beside him, well-sat and gazing into the street ahead and still steering both horses. Hawk’s eyes and somewhere in the mouth the suggestion of a smile: Sir Raphael Benjamin on a spree.

  Pinsent said: ‘You came back for me.’

  Hunger forced Kinnaird to learn faster. Without Lucie’s charm, credibility, and fluency in the language he’d been paying ludicrous sums for the simplest food. At this rate he’d spend his whole purse in a week and still be living in a tree.

  A faint memory, from as far back as memory went; the reality of a childhood in rebellion-wracked Scotland. Get smart before you get hungry.

  He felt his empty gut; felt his frailty, and knew the danger. Promising it would be the last time, he allowed himself to spend another fortune on a loaf and some cheese, bought from P’tit Pierre, one of the two unofficial kings of the forest republic. Pierre – who with the dubious irony of his class was anything but petit – lived in one of the few stone buildings with something like a complete roof. He’d created what passed for luxury: a chair, blankets, a metal bucket he could light a fire in as a stove. On a shelf, the debris of the brutal economy of their community: two cracked beakers; a pair of women’s boots, which Pierre had arranged as a kind of ornament; a prayer book; a pair of spectacles. When Kinnaird had arrived, he’d been whittling a stick with a large ivory-handled knife.

  He handed Kinnaird the cheese, wra
pped in a foul cloth. ‘You want sausage?’

  ‘Thank you, no.’ Pierre shrugged, with a glance of complacent pity at the desperation of a man who would not pay a week’s wage for a sausage; and as he turned away his fat swaying shoulder knocked against another knife, which had been embedded in one of the timbers framing the building. He stared down at it – a cheap, simple blade – stooped and picked it up and tossed it onto the shelf. Kinnaird had been considering the swaying movements; he fancied Pierre had one leg shorter, or wasted.

  Pierre sat, and picked up the ivory-handled knife and his stick from his table again. His absorption and a few gouges in the stick showed he was trying to make something decorative. It still looked like a stick. Kinnaird nodded at the knife. ‘I saw that in the hands of a newcomer yesterday; lawyer from Versailles.’

  Pierre’s eyes came up under his brows. ‘You see it in my hands today.’ He gazed at Kinnaird, defiant but then uncertain. ‘That’s progress!’ And he pushed out a big laugh.

  Kinnaird smiled like an idiot. ‘I’ll tell you what, P’tit Pierre; I make you a proposal.’ Pierre watched him, holding his bravado. ‘The fortune I’ve paid you, you could get to America maybe, or make yourself king in Paris. No need to bother with the little stuff now.’ He could see Pierre swelling. ‘You could throw the sausage in for free.’

  Pierre grinned at the hilarious idea of generosity. He sucked his teeth. ‘Sausage now – very expensive, sausage.’ He shook his head. ‘I like you, English. You’re a funny man.’

  ‘You’re too much of a trader for me, Pierre. Very well then. Something useless, for a funny man.’ For a moment he’d worried that Pierre might actually give him the foul sausage. He affected to look around. ‘That old knife, now. The little one. To celebrate progress, and lawyers who don’t ask questions.’

  Pierre watched him, not sure what he thought and what was funny any more. ‘My old knife?’

  Kinnaird shrugged, and nodded at the ivory handle. ‘What’s the value of the mouse, against the lion?’