Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  But now, strangely, he found that he did want Ned’s stolid chatter, not the silence of his two paid servants.

  Religion had been attacked by law, and priests massacred in the streets, and the cathedral of Meaux was more strange than ever, bulky and exposed and lonely on the landscape. The bishop was keeping his head down somewhere. But the building was still there. Even the Revolution would take a while to erode it. And within its precincts, there was a library. There was no longer a bustle of voices in the cathedral, no longer the hurry of monks and worshippers, the whispers of surplices and sins. But there were still books. And guarding the books was a librarian.

  The librarian would have been a natural companion to Bonfils, the fugitive servant to a king who was no longer a king. Bonfils would have taken this road to Reims often enough in the royal entourage, and as the entourage passed through Meaux the bishop would have received the King, and in their shadows two quiet servants had found an affinity. And when Bonfils was wanted by the Revolution, and fleeing Paris for his old home in Montmirail, and when he found that his precious book was actually a burden, what more natural refuge for it than his acquaintance, the librarian of Meaux? What better place to hide a book than in a library?

  And now Bonfils was dead; but the librarian was still there, in his library, a solitary scared man trying to preserve his little temple of papers while the world burned.

  Fouché walks away from Roland’s house still inspired by his own image in front of the two ladies.

  Then he starts to walk faster, as he thinks more about Lavalier.

  A policeman must follow her home from Roland’s. To check she doesn’t attempt to pass a warning. The mysterious Kinnaird has been to her house at least once; this much is known.

  It’s a precaution only, and the policeman need not wait once she gets home; in truth, the trap is closing and cannot be avoided now. It’s more a curiosity, then: to see if she could try to pass a message, and if she would.

  Or might the Rolands . . . ?

  The mystery of the jewels, the mystery of the royal documents, these have remained obscure. But the British agent Kinnaird is connected to everything.

  At the ministry, he sends a policeman hurrying back to Roland’s to pick up the trail of the woman Lavalier.

  Then, stiff in his chair, he lets his mind fill with a British agent, and a Prussian agent, and the network of the Friends of Magnetism, and how they all might be interlinked.

  Somehow, he doubts that Emma Lavalier will risk herself tonight. She had seemed comfortable at the Rolands. Almost comfortable with him. She knows where the power is now, and it’s not with a fugitive British spy.

  Kinnaird considers the walls of Paris. As they appear to him now, behind the chaos of smaller buildings that have started to spread out beyond the city, glimpsed but never seen whole, they seem unworldly: a presence that does not fit with the normal society around them; something vaster, something indifferent to humans. Cities were the places where he had thrived. Wherever men concentrated together, a man of thoughtful and enterprising disposition might find honest benefit.

  Now he must look at them anew. With their gates and their guards they are a trap. And yet, with their density of humanity, he must think of them as an escape as well. The letter brought by Lucie could certainly be a trap, too. But he cannot go back, not now.

  He’s on the fringes of the city, near St-Denis. He can see it across the fields, an insignificant and benign thing compared to the mass of Paris behind him.

  He hasn’t forgotten his escape from the Tambour. The madness of that moment, skittering around the rooms like a wet hen and finally throwing himself out of the window, still makes his heart hammer; still comes to him like fear. And the foolishness of his predicament, so confused and so panicked and so utterly the tool of other men, still comes to him like shame.

  It had been the turning point. The moment when his dreamy bewildered meandering in this place of chaos became instantly more real, and more dangerous. The hammering at the door, and suddenly the madness of France wasn’t happening around him any more; it was happening to him.

  Or had it been earlier? A letter, opened in an Edinburgh coffee house. Henry Greene, reaching out of the past and of unknown so-interesting France. And he had let himself be plucked out of Edinburgh – the most steady, the most promising, and today probably the safest city in Europe, where his biggest danger had been that a Glasgow wholesaler might try to horn in on a contract to ship a crate of tea. Now he’s in the chaos, and the agents of the Revolution are hunting him.

  He starts to walk. The turning point was when he became conscious, and when he started to react. And he’s not in the chaos; he is become part of the chaos. And in the chaos, a man with open eyes and quick mind and steady heart may do something. Revolutionary France is one vast marketplace, of ideas and loyalties and lives. Nothing restricted; anything at a price; everything for sale. And Keith Kinnaird is out to trade.

  As a boy, Saint-Jean Guilbert had tortured mice.

  Not physically. When he bored of them they died quickly, crushed or cut. They were so small, there was no suffering in them.

  What he liked to do was confuse them. Make an enclosure of logs and stones and watch them scurry in circles. Squash the enclosure a bit, watch them scurry. Maybe set a stub of candle in there, see how they reacted. Squash the enclosure more. Wonder what they were thinking.

  He’d catch the ones who came into the house, sitting in the dust and crumbs at dawn until they emerged. Or he’d walk out beyond the fringes of the town and lie down on the edge of a field, hand waiting in one of the furrows that they travelled.

  Guilbert knows that his satisfaction in his current employment is directly linked to his pleasures as a boy.

  He sits well-wrapped. Always important when waiting. He watches the door. His eyes never move from the door.

  Sometimes the mice knew they were trapped, and sometimes they didn’t know they were trapped. They were always trapped.

  In Meaux, Sir Raphael Benjamin is thinking about nuns.

  Traditional dream of a spree, of course: locked in a nunnery. Just you and the old feller, no one else can get in, you and the old feller and all that fresh milky flesh under those rough skirts, behind those high walls, giggles and gasps and bless you all my dears.

  The walls of the Convent des Ursulines are cool around him.

  No nuns, alas. Place deserted, hence its great appeal to a man looking for a spot in the centre of Meaux, stone’s throw from the cathedral, where he might do a bit of business away from anyone who might be watching.

  Somehow rather a waste, though.

  Benjamin can feel the pouch against his heart. Its subtle weight; how it moves against his chest as he breathes.

  The Convent des Ursulines, deserted, night-stifled, is all things considered a grim barracks of a place. Endless whitewashed corridors. Doorways dark wood, evenly spaced all the way into the distance. His mind wanders along long white corridors that open out in front of him to reveal dark doorways, and he shifts on the chair and scowls at his night. From the outside the place is a blank-faced thing, the few windows high and tight, the whole forbidding. Inside it’s all cold, and echoes. All pale, all stone, and all you can think about is the life that’s no longer here.

  Must have been grim even then. It echoes because there’s nothing soft here any more, nothing plush or upholstered or comfortable. But perhaps there had never been anything soft here.

  Damned strange sort of a life. Bunch of cold shrivelled women locked up with the echoes.

  Surely somewhere, though, there had been a flicker of warmth: in some private moment, a rough cloth lifted briefly, a glimpse of flesh, something truly alive.

  But none else there to enjoy it. In the entrance hall of the Convent des Ursulines, Raphael Benjamin sits alone on a simple wooden chair, and dreams of something young and amazed on his lap, and waits for the moment of his transaction.

  Emma Lavalier stares out of her window, at th
e moon, at the night.

  The watcher has gone. He’d followed her home – she’d been aware of him by the end of the journey – and she’d seen him from her window still watching, but after only a few minutes she’d seen the shadow of the tree trunk stretch and split and then the man walking away.

  She has the vague idea that the police had been better at it under the old regime; harder to spot. But you never knew.

  Somewhere out there in the night, Fouché is hunting Kinnaird. She has a clear vision of their faces: always anxious, always hungry, always unsatisfied, scurrying in the moonlight.

  Raph Benjamin is somewhere out there too. His face seems more comfortable to her; and so, probably, is whatever he’s doing.

  And now, forehead against the window pane but never as cool as she hoped, she sees all of them: boys, muttering in the shadows, playing their strange games.

  They are hidden games, far from the moonlit lane outside. The lane is utterly still; nothing has moved since the departure of the watcher. Perhaps it was enthusiasm that made the revolutionary police more obvious.

  Or perhaps they have a different intention. Perhaps the object is not to catch malfeasance, but to make it impossible; to show everyone that they are watched all the time.

  And if everyone knew they were being watched all the time, how much of life would die?

  To anyone watching, at this middle hour of the autumn night in the Year One of the Republic, the front wall of the precincts of the cathedral of Meaux is imposing and blank and deserted. Beyond the wall, hints of the cathedral itself and the other buildings around it rise towards the moon, strands of pale stone suggesting the mighty facades and elaborate carvings hiding in the shadows. But at the entrance gate, the cathedral and the other buildings that make up its community turn their backs on the world. And given what the world’s been up to recently, who shall blame them?

  A horse clops hollow over the cobbles to the gate, and stops, and a figure with an elegant coat and a well-wrapped face gets down from the horse. He knocks at the gate.

  He waits patiently, his figure largely hidden by the horse.

  Another horse follows, and stops a short distance away. Another figure gets down, this one dressed simple.

  Within half a minute, a small door within the gate opens, and the first figure is murmuring to the porter, and being hurried inside. The second figure ambles forwards, so he’s holding both horses, in front of the gate.

  Another minute, and the door opens again. The elegant coat steps out, there’s a brief exchange with the man at the horses, and the coat goes back in again. The second figure trudges away, pulling both horses behind him.

  Keith Kinnaird can hear his own footsteps on the ground, such is the silence.

  Making an impression. Kinnaird resonates at last.

  He tries to walk more softly.

  He remembers Lucie, her hand in her chemise, her anxiety. It’s a trap.

  Lucie. There was a worldliness to the young woman. He’d stuck too long with his first impression of her: the discomfort in the world, the clumsiness. But she had lived in the world; survived in the gutters and the shadows; and it made her, even half a generation younger than him, wiser and stronger.

  Lucie has no loyalty.

  It came like the betrayal of a friendship, or an amour. Lucie might be curious, and she might even be fond, but she is not loyal – to anything.

  All of France around him in the darkness, waiting, and he unseen.

  Somehow it has become impossible to avoid the world.

  He thinks of the woman Lavalier. The most exotic creature he has ever met: she belongs in a Medici palazzo poisoning, or the Turk’s seraglio. Yet also the most worldly. There is a kind of honesty to the woman Lavalier.

  It is because she does not care, about anything.

  If someone is trying to trap him, he cannot ignore it. If there’s a weevil in the biscuit, you don’t keep on eating.

  Is it a trap? He stops philosophizing and reviews the facts and possibilities. Where he has been and who has seen him. The odd letter. His interest to the revolutionary regime. What do they know of me?

  He stops walking. Of course it is a trap.

  He considers the darkness around him. He tries to make it familiar. Tries to feel that it is his. It is all a trap.

  He starts to walk towards his destination again, through darkness that wraps its arm around his shoulders and starts to rifle his pockets.

  Is this who I am become?

  Guilbert waits. He feels the wall against his back; adjusts his shoulders; checks that he is still totally hidden in the shadow.

  He’s hungry.

  Not for food.

  This is what waiting is: appetite.

  He doesn’t have – he doesn’t even wonder at – Monsieur’s little obsessions. This document or that man; the puzzle; the politics. For Guilbert it is only the hunt, the daily search for food; for prey.

  Monsieur thinks there is a goal – he believes in conclusions, in victories. Guilbert knows there’s just life, just eating to survive, for as long as you can, because the only alternative is death. Monsieur believes you can observe the world like the natural philosophers and make your deductions. Guilbert knows there’s no pattern, and no answer; just a lot of animals, bumping into each other like cattle in a barn at night.

  His eyes never move from the door.

  He’s an animal too, no less than any. But he knows it; and he has a knife.

  To anyone watching, the stillness of night has returned quickly to the front wall of the precincts of the cathedral of Meaux.

  Anyone watching is presumably wondering about the man in the fine coat still inside. He is still inside, which is presumably reassuring to the watcher.

  Such is Raph Benjamin’s satisfied calculation.

  He himself is still secure like chastity in the Convent des Ursulines, around the corner from the cathedral gate. His first paid man is still in the cathedral, enjoying a glass of wine perhaps, or looting the plate for all Raph cares. The man’s work is done: he had entered, collected the book, emerged briefly and used the cover of his horse’s body to slip the book into the saddle bag, and disappeared into the cathedral again to fill the mind of the hypothetical watcher, while the second man led the two horses and Xavier Bonfils’s precious book away into the night.

  Now the book is Benjamin’s, delivered to the convent by his second paid man, hefted in his hands and then slipped into a bag and slung over his shoulder.

  Raph Benjamin is playing his own game this night. And that’s how you win: at a game that no one else even knows is being played.

  Raph Benjamin: his own game, and his own rules. He’s resisted the urge to look at the book.

  If it’s all a trap then there’s no escape and no use fretting.

  Kinnaird feels his footsteps pounding into France. He can see the door ahead now.

  He curses the fatuous French philosophizing that’s rotting his brain.

  What would a practical man do? One of the adventuring men, like Sir Raphael lace-edged Benjamin, immortal and charming?

  Kinnaird considers his surroundings. Looks for opportunities to left and right, tries to remember what he’s passed already.

  When do I run? What triggers it? What is the clue? What if there is no Lucie Gérard with a horse?

  Should I run now?

  He sees himself, ludicrous, running through France chased by shadows. He knows that he can’t run.

  Not because I’m proud and not because I’m slow, but because I’ll look so damn’ ridiculous.

  The door is clear in front of him.

  Guilbert whispers into the darkness beside him: ‘In the porch. Nice and tidy.’

  He knows that the darkness is listening.

  ‘Soon as he’s through the door.’

  The darkness grunts its understanding.

  Guilbert commands the night.

  The details of the night roar at Kinnaird. His feet pound and the resonance shudders
through his legs. The air scrapes across his face. He hears trees and house timbers moving. The door looms vast in front of him and he sees the iron studs that decorate it, sees the cracks in the woodwork, seems to see through the cracks and strains to see the other side.

  He reaches forwards and his hand balloons before him and stretches for the door.

  The latch cracks like a musket shot and Guilbert is moving. He knows that as he moves the men with him start to move. ‘Soon as he’s through the door,’ he whispers, to himself now. Then words and human senses are lost and he’s moving faster. His prey must have no time to turn, no time to run; Guilbert will be in front of him as soon as he’s through the door.

  The door swings open in front of Kinnaird, the crack widening and lightening and his whole existence opening out, and: ‘You!’

  Emma Lavalier herself has opened the door to him. Kinnaird starts to speak, starts to bow.

  ‘You! But you are hunted: you’re to be arrested this night!’

  ‘But why, Madame?’ There must be a candle somewhere beside her; perhaps she’s holding it. Its colour flickers on her forehead, her nose, her chin, her shoulders, her breasts. Somewhere in the gloom, there are two tiny points of light in her eyes. Kinnaird feels himself breathing hard. ‘I must know, Madame. What is told of me in Paris, among the men of influence whom I know you know? Why do they try to trap me? Of what am I accused? You are my only way to understanding, and my only way to cleansing my name.’ She is more powerful to him than ever, more mysterious. ‘I am innocent, Madame, and harmless!’

  ‘You are the most dangerous man in France! If you have sense you will fly from here, to save your neck; and if you have courtesy you will do it to save mine.’

  He watches her a long moment. Then he turns and disappears into the darkness.