Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  ‘Empties only. It came in full from the coast; unfortunately we can’t always make the return run pay.’

  ‘My point is doubled. Care for details made me most of my success in trade, but I still think I’d have trusted the driver with a cart of empty barrels.’

  The man nodded. He looked at Kinnaird, and smiled. ‘The people. One likes to keep an eye on one’s people. Check they get home safely. Usually without the aid of romantic enthusiasts.’

  Now Kinnaird nodded. ‘I assumed it was something like that. A Christian act. But I still think that the Spanish lad helped his lady friend a little.’

  ‘Perhaps he did at that.’ The man offered his hand. ‘Jarreau.’

  Kinnaird shook the hand, and considered the face.

  ‘Kinnaird,’ he said.

  A frown opposite. ‘I think I have heard the na- . . . You are he . . . !’ Jarreau sat back in his chair. ‘My goodness, Monsieur Kinnaird. You are quite the most notorious merchant in France. You must find the trade here stimulating indeed.’

  ‘On my word, sir, I do not know why. I find myself notorious, for feats that I do not know or acknowledge.’ He saw the disbelief. ‘Sincerely.’

  Disbelief became a kind of wonder. ‘In which case, Monsieur Kinnaird, your misfortune exceeds your notoriety.’

  ‘France has been a strange place.’

  ‘Come come, Monsieur. As a man of affairs, you know that the first principle of doing business in a new town is to familiarize yourself with the customs and habits of the people. In revolutionary France, the customs and habits are passion, fantasy, envy, revenge, suspicion, fear and blood.’

  ‘Sounds like my first day in Glasgow. You’re on the right side of it, at least.’

  ‘Side?’ Jarreau seemed genuinely surprised. ‘You have the most curious approach to business, Monsieur Kinnaird. I support no “side”. I pursue my own principles, and I hope I do so discreetly and prudently.’ He sat straighter; he saw Kinnaird’s approval. ‘And if you’ll pardon a discourtesy, I’d be obliged if – given your present profile – you stayed as far away as possible from my operations.’

  It hurt. But Kinnaird nodded. ‘I understand. But I hope to . . . to stabilize my affairs, and resume more discreet and satisfactory dealings. Perhaps we might then find mutual advantage, Monsieur Jarreau.’

  Smile. ‘We might indeed, Monsieur Kinnaird.’

  The town of Évreux looked like it might be rather lively, and Raphael Benjamin resented having to keep himself confined to an inn on the outskirts. On the second night he left Ned sleeping and slipped out to size up the pleasures of the place. But he knew of no safe doors to knock on, no warm welcomes he could trust; and when he saw light through a shutter, or heard laughter from some hidden conviviality, they felt like taunts.

  When Pinsent asked where they were going, he cursed him because he didn’t know himself. Eventually he said something about Évreux being on the way to the Channel. Pinsent said, ‘England, Raph? You mean we could go back?’ And they both knew it was an empty hope.

  After his tour of the unwelcoming town in the small hours, he’d lain awake, reviewing the rather insubstantial record of his accumulated years. Sport enough, but was it really supposed to have led him no farther than a French tap-house, too scared to get a woman or a good meal?

  With the dawn he’d cursed himself for self-pity, and gone down to command an early breakfast. Soon after he’d sat, a couple entered the room. They didn’t see him at first, not until they’d asked for food. When they did see him, the effect was peculiar. Immediate concern, a glance at each other, then down, and a furtive glance sideways in the unlikely hope that the kitchen had produced their breakfast before the order had even reached it.

  Benjamin considered his dirty coat, and his fugitive state. He felt his unshaven chin, and irritation at yet more people who would not know him.

  An old man and his – no, surely not wife, not unless the old man was the richest luckiest devil in France; daughter, more likely.

  Either way.

  He kept his eyes on the old man, until when the old man happened to look up Benjamin gave him a respectful nod. The old man reciprocated instinctively, then looked down. The exchange naturally got the woman’s attention, and she couldn’t resist glancing up herself, to find Benjamin’s eyes entirely on her. Very charming curls. He let the smile spread over his face, and gave her a little nod too. She looked away.

  He didn’t see them again. He heard they’d started taking their meals in their rooms. Which was damned unsporting.

  ‘News, Guilbert? You have that look about you: somehow well-fed, somehow still hungry.’

  Guilbert didn’t really register the point. ‘Monsieur is most . . . pleasant. And I have news. The surgeon has examined the corpse we found in Montmirail, in the house of Bonfils. He confirms from the condition and arrangement of the teeth that it is the man he treated a few weeks back. The Englishman Henry Greene.’

  Fouché nodded, slowly. ‘That’s tidy, Guilbert. It confirms the English as somehow complicit in royalist plotting.’ Guilbert was impassive. ‘Which, as you are presumably thinking behind that mask, we would in any case have assumed.’ He winced. ‘But how, Guilbert? We may speculate well enough what they aim at, but how do they work?’

  ‘Monsieur?’

  Fouché smiled. ‘You are the good agent, Guilbert. You want to know the intentions of our enemies. Me, I take it for granted that they intend to defeat the Revolution and restore the discredited King and his corruptions. I need no surgeons or tortures to tell me that. But how do they intend this, Guilbert? If I knew their methods – if I knew their connections – I would have a chance of confounding them.’

  He watched Guilbert; eternal, unyielding, indifferent.

  ‘What do we know of the death of the man Greene?

  Guilbert shook his head once. ‘Knocked on the head, Monsieur. Something rough: club or stone, maybe.’

  ‘A murder, or – or a fight? Bonfils could have killed Greene?’

  Guilbert’s faint insubordinate shrug. ‘Perhaps, Monsieur. But they didn’t think he’d been in the district long. Perhaps that’s wrong. Perhaps it’s possible the Englishman came to put some pressure on him, and Bonfils refused, and they fought. But –’

  ‘Or Bonfils wanted help, and the Englishman refused, and so – ’ He stopped, and glared at Guilbert. ‘But this is mere speculation! This has no value.’

  ‘No, Monsieur. Anyway, we still cannot know when this Greene died. Certainly well before the servant Bonfils. Weeks.’

  ‘We must do better, Guilbert. We must shake the English harder!’

  ‘Yes, Monsieur.’

  ‘We have the body of Greene still?’

  ‘In the cellars, Monsieur. We’ve put him in a box – he’s not fit to be lying around, Monsieur. And it means he’s ready for burying.’

  ‘For now we keep him. There may be something . . . In the clothes, say.’ He smiled uncertain. ‘This Greene, Guilbert, alive or dead, has been a mystery and a confusion. I want that mystery and confusion working to our benefit for once.’

  ‘Old Arnold, now.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Drowned when the packet went down off Boulogne. Thomas.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Fever. Dunkirk.’

  ‘Brussels.’

  ‘Course it was. Course it was. Reading his bloody Gibbon to the end. Three.’

  Ned’s day of the dead, Benjamin called it. Pinsent’s habit, when trying to cheer himself up, of reciting a catechism of past acquaintances who hadn’t survived quite as long as he had thus far. ‘Seven.’

  ‘Marten.’ They were in Benjamin’s room, playing cards through a day that would never end.

  ‘Fight with a gypsy. Folkestone.’

  ‘That was Marston, ass. Twelve. Marten’s in Rome, living with a whore.’

  ‘So says he. That’s fifteen, Ned.’

  ‘Got you that time, eh? Twenty, and a pair.’

  ‘Mm.’ Rome s
ounded warm, and easy, and lasting. ‘Twenty-eight.’

  Benjamin wasn’t admitting that he didn’t know where they were going. Pinsent was too uncomfortable about it to ask any more. ‘Go.’

  ‘We’re set well enough here, aren’t we, Raph?’ Benjamin watched him. Pinsent wasn’t looking up as he spoke. ‘Fairish food and wine; pack of cards.’

  ‘Well enough, Ned.’

  ‘What were those papers you were writing? Never saw you use a pen so much.’

  ‘Some more distractions for our hosts. They’ll find from this correspondence that the Scotsman has been amazingly active against them.’

  ‘Hah. Always the scheme. Always keeping your options open.’

  Benjamin knew his options. They didn’t feel all that open. He’d been repeating them to himself for much of the last forty-eight hours, and throughout Pinsent’s litany of dead men. Switzerland. Italy.

  ‘Vanstone.’

  The Low Countries didn’t look too clever, not with the French revolutionary army driving for the sea.

  ‘Never really knew what that was, did we? Bloody awful he looked, at the end.’

  East, into the German lands? Were they so desperate?

  ‘That fellow who got stabbed by the pimp in Calais. Never knew his name.’

  What worried him was that he didn’t seem able to make a decision.

  ‘And old Hal Greene now, of course.’

  Sometime in the evening Benjamin had gone down to command some more wine, and see what food he could scrounge. In the main room of the inn a man was talking loudly to the innkeeper, while the innkeeper used a rag to smear a slick of wine and crumbs along the counter and back again: a coachman, it seemed, still cloaked and muffled against the wind and complaining about his troubles trying to find adequate rooms in town for his passengers, an old lawyer and his sick wife.

  Both men seemed to take it for granted that the Old Willow Tree would not be adequate. Benjamin had taken advantage of the innkeeper’s absorption to check the register.

  A breath of air out in the twilit street, trying to find freedom in it, and a piss. Back in the inn, the young woman had appeared. He watched her from the doorway as she gave her instructions, enjoying just the hints of her profile under a scarf, enjoying the sound of her voice. There might be freedom in there.

  Others in the inn had been watching her too, he’d noticed. The dream of freedom was proving elusive in France.

  ‘We don’t know how he died, do we, Ned?’ He looked up from his cards as he spoke. Pinsent shrugged, and he nodded. It was no longer necessary for death to have a means, or a reason. ‘Go.’

  Wrapped tight in a pouch and tied close to him, he could feel the two royal jewels. Surely he’d sell them. Surely he’d be able to live forever on the proceeds.

  ‘Six.’

  But not yet. For some reason, not yet.

  He didn’t like the fact that he’d not told Ned. Kept meaning to. Knew he never would. But he didn’t like the idea of being a secret thief. It was cheap. Sordid.

  And somehow these jewels were more than money. They had significance. They were political. Had he indeed taken them to look after them – the act of a gentleman; a courtesy to a king?

  ‘Raph, you ever wonder how you’ll go? When it’s your time?’ Benjamin looked up, scowling at it. Pinsent was watching him earnestly. ‘You know: fever, or fight, or whatnot?’

  ‘Noisily, Ned. I shall go noisily.’

  Pinsent chuckled, grateful.

  At some point within the preceding twenty years, the salon of the Swan in Vernon had had pretensions: its drinkers and diners sat in booths framed by classical columns; candelabra on each table were supplemented by a chandelier in the centre of the room; behind the serving counter a long mirror doubled their light. And during the preceding twenty years, life had called the bluff of those pretensions. The plaster work on the columns was crumbling and pock-marked; it looked as if the mice had got into the salon, or a skirmish of muskets – and the general condition made both scenarios seem credible. Two of the bolts holding the chandelier to the main beam had given up the struggle a while back, and the cobwebbed constellation hung askew and would swing and creak when the door let in the wind. Damp had got down behind the mirror, distorting the wall and cracking the glass, so that according to the reflection one section in the middle of the salon did not exist; another molten triangle of mirror next to the soup tub was missing, and the rest was tarnished and blotched, showing the Swan’s few patrons as blurred ghostly things.

  To Keith Kinnaird’s eyes too, one of them seemed to have passed on. A back, the back of a head, slumped over the counter. Fingers had failed and abandoned the effort to reach a goblet just inches away, a resignation mirrored in the seam gaping down the back of the coat. The man behind the counter was ignoring the body.

  The door opened, and the chandelier creaked into the silence and the wind ruffled the hair on top of the slumped head.

  Then laughter, sharp and ugly, and the door closed and the wind dropped and the hair subsided. Kinnaird glanced at the mirror and watched two blurs glide behind him to a table, heard voices, the only sound in the salon. As the waiter passed on his way towards them, Kinnaird gestured to his own glass, and continued to watch the body at the counter. The voices rose and fell nearby. The waiter returned with beakers of wine and water and poured from each into Kinnaird’s glass.

  ‘Revolution’s been good to you, Trichet,’ one of the voices said; Kinnaird was always interested to find people the Revolution had been good to, and heard flattery and bitterness in the voice. Trichet observed that he had been good to the Revolution. Chance for men of ability to get their just rewards. Escape the parasites, he explained more judiciously. Wipe them out. His companion noted that Trichet had done more than his share in that direction, and they both seemed to think this a good thing.

  ‘Fucking aristocrats,’ Trichet spoke with pity rather than venom. ‘All those silks and titles and generations; and none of it’ll save them.’

  Kinnaird’s interest faded, recaptured by the scene at the counter. The slumped head had creaked upwards on the neck, and seemed to be trying to find itself in the mirror. Whether because of the mirror’s fog or its own ghastly pallor, it failed. Then, with the solemnity and surprise of a Lazarus, the body lifted into an upright position on the stool.

  One forearm slipped and the body slumped with it and swayed backwards and forwards on the teetering stool; clutching desperately for the counter, at last it settled into the vertical again. A man little more than twenty, surely; very drunk, or beginning to feel the after-effects of it. He now held himself very erect, determined to defy the stool, and the eyes stared into the mirror’s clouded distance.

  Kinnaird watched the performance for a moment longer, sympathy and amusement, and then returned to his wine and the contemplation of provincial French politics.

  A quarter-hour later he left, a coin on the table and a nod to the servingman. It was fully night outside, and colder, and he stepped to the side and back into the shelter of the building to button up his coat. Some kind of wooden terrace arrangement a step above the street; perhaps they sat out here on summer days. As he strained at the button at his collar, Trichet’s companion emerged from the salon, and then Trichet behind him. Polite goodnights, and the companion stepped down into the street and walked quickly across it and away.

  Trichet hesitated a moment on the step, doing up his coat, and he was still standing there when a shadow launched itself out of the salon and wrapped itself around him and drove him off the step and down into the darkness. The body – two bodies – writhed and rolled, one behind the other and arms entwined, and something flashed and there was a scream – terrified, short – and Kinnaird stared and could not move. Still the bodies rolled, and the upper – Trichet; it must have been Trichet – levered itself up off of the other and staggered upright and Kinnaird glimpsed a streak of red across his neck. Now the other was half-upright and lunging again and as Trichet stum
bled sidewards a hand swung round and the knife stuck in his arm. He squealed, gasped, flapped round to reach the handle, and floundered back into his attacker; the attacker went sprawling backwards and down, and Trichet dropped to his knees. The attacker came up into a crouch and was lurching forwards again at the unprotected back when Kinnaird caught him by the collar and dragged him back. Anticipating the attack and not feeling it, Trichet twisted round and gaped for an instant and realized his chance and struggled up and ran into the night, the blade still sticking out of his arm between the fingers of his clutching other hand and glinting in the last of the light from the salon.

  Kinnaird let go of the collar, and stepped back. The shadow wriggled away from him and slumped against the step, gasping deeply. ‘I – I didn’t ... ’

  ‘Well, no,’ Kinnaird said when it didn’t go any further. ‘Not very successfully, anyway.’

  It was the young man who’d been at the counter. He stared up at Kinnaird, and then his shoulders shook and the gasps became sobs.

  Eventually Ned Pinsent had stumbled away to bed. The innkeeper had divided most of his original bedrooms into two, to maximize the money he could screw out of the solitary travellers who were his usual trade. The possibility of solitude was keeping Benjamin sane. He had also noticed that his neighbour was the young woman. The old man was the other side of her, in a room of his own.

  Benjamin put another hour or more into the correspondence he was creating for his own, more exciting Kinnaird. It was past midnight when he heard movement from the room next door.

  Door open a crack, he watched the young woman – her head covered and face obscured under a shawl – making for the back stairs. She was moving carefully over the boards. Then from the window he saw a shadow appear in the yard; saw another shadow meeting it.

  When the young woman returned ten minutes later, she opened her door and slipped back into her room with the same caution she’d taken to leave it, face in shadow and eyes looking everywhere. She started to close the door, looked round, and gasped. Raphael Benjamin was sitting in her chair.