Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  The yield is massive – I will continue discreetly to enquire after figures – it may surely be measured in the suffering of Prussian soldiers. And yet by concentrating the production of this essential military substance the Revolution may be thought to have left itself vulnerable to individual incidents of misfortune or malice.

  E.E.

  [SS F/24/149 (DECYPHERED)]

  When working at the premises of a customer and staying away from home, Gamain the locksmith was obliged to forego the fortifying routine of Madame Gamain’s midday soup and depend on the creativity and kindness of a landlady. Today a loaf of bread and a block of cheese, and he’d paid extra for them. The cheese was fresh – come in from one of the farms hereabouts, where the countryside came close to the city’s edge. He worried that it would prove too heavy a meal and render him dull-witted for the afternoon.

  He sat on a stool, in unconscious recreation of Madame Gamain’s kitchen. The saltpetre factory of Desmarets soared above him. The window over his shoulder was three or even four times his own height. The vat in front of him was approximately the same: the image and proportions of a copper kettle, if he were a mouse at its foot. There were four such in this chamber, in a measured line. Above them, running along the line of them, a wooden gantry.

  He’d watched the movements of the workers all morning, when not bent over his work. The men fed the machines; served them. They wheeled barrows along the gantry and emptied them into the vats and moved away. Their movements were monitored and guided by a foreman. To avoid a jam, the men moved at a steady interval – ten paces between them, Gamain reckoned it.

  He did not consider the men much. They weren’t craftsmen, clearly. Peasants, governed by something much more regular than the weather or their wills. They were part of a mechanism as much as his watch-springs.

  The fatness of the cheese felt luxurious. He could feel his stomach filling.

  A perplexing time. So far he and his business had not suffered from the chaos, but he realized that he was perpetually tense, waiting for disruption. His stomach always felt tense; an overwound spring. (Or perhaps that was the cheese.) The letter commissioning him to fit a new set of locks to the magistrate’s offices in Chantilly had been most specific. Yet when he’d reached Chantilly, after fully a day travelling, they insisted that they had sent no such letter. They didn’t even want any locks; indeed, they were most discourteous on the point, even though it was surely he who had been put to inconvenience.

  So an unnecessary night in an inn, and an unnecessary day of travel back towards Paris, to Joinville. At least the Commission at the Desmarets factory had been as stated. Two days of work, and most courteous methodical people.

  Gamain considered the pipes leading out from under the vat; he wondered at the valve mechanism.

  He leaves discreetly, among the bustle of other men. He looks about him once, an unobtrusive review of the faces around him. His hand feels to check that the cloth has recovered the doorway. His hands flex. They rise, and they touch his lapel, and his neckcloth. They drop to his sides, and flex again. One hand comes back up to his pocket, pats it, and drops again. He turns to the right. He seems to disappear for a moment between the huts, but reappears almost immediately. Again he looks about him. Then two – three – steps. He stoops and untethers a horse. He leads the horse along the alley between the huts. His face disappears and reappears among others. He mounts without elegance.

  Guilbert sees it all.

  He notices things. The horse is near enough for flight, but not too near to betray the exact hut where he shelters. A careful man, this. He does not mount immediately, but hides himself among the movements of others.

  Guilbert has been practising the man’s name. It is still uncomfortable. Ki- as the French ‘qui’, and then the tortured vowels: -nnaird.

  The Monsieur is becoming obsessed by this Kinnaird. Guilbert doesn’t think about him too much. Guilbert watches. Guilbert sees.

  This Kinnaird has chosen his sanctuary in the gypsy camp to be able to spot people approaching. It means that he can be spotted leaving.

  He sets off along the track, the horse at a walk. Unobtrusive. He is followed.

  Guilbert waits until he’s confident his prey is not returning, checks again that his two men are following but not too close, then stands to his full height. He puts his hat on, and starts to walk. The hat is the signal, and as he walks his other two men converge on him. They reach the door at the same time, and Guilbert pulls the red cloth aside.

  One man waits outside the door. Guilbert and the other enter. The single room is searched quickly enough. The palliasse. Under a blanket, two maps: Paris; and northern France. A cloth bag hangs on a nail, to keep valuables dry and away from rats, but it’s empty now. Guilbert’s head is empty; he lives only through his eyes.

  Down in the dirt, beside one of the timbers holding the roof up, is a tiny coil of string. Guilbert kneels quickly, and finger-and-thumb takes one end and very slowly begins to pull. The string disappears into the dirt, and as he pulls more firmly, it strains and straightens and something is shifting under the dirt.

  In an oilcloth packet hidden under the dirt, there’s a letter.

  From outside the door, a squawk. Guilbert only half hears it.

  ‘Pinon?’

  The sentry outside the door doesn’t reply.

  Guilbert stands, the other man with him. Standing away from it, Guilbert reaches out and pulls the red cloth aside. He sees three men through the doorway – gypsies, by their faces and their layers of rags. He sees two knives and one smith’s hammer.

  He considers the weapons. He looks up at the faces again. He realizes that they can’t see him clearly. He shifts slightly to the side. Pinon is no longer by the door. He steps forwards, one careful step. He sees the three men tense. He sees Pinon now, to one side, slumped on the ground and still.

  The gypsy in the middle says: ‘You didn’t knock.’

  Guilbert’s finger touches the red cloth. ‘There’s no door.’

  The gypsy smiles. ‘You come uninvited in the house of our friend; you are a stranger and a thief.’

  Guilbert shakes his head once. ‘Ministry of the Interior. I am authority. I am law.’

  The man hesitates. ‘Not here you’re not.’

  ‘Your friend is an enemy of France. An outlaw.’

  ‘In this place, we all are.’

  ‘I can burn this place.’

  ‘It’ll save us packing up.’

  ‘I can erase you from the earth.’

  The man steps forwards. ‘We are the earth, and when I or my sons have visited you in the night and cut your throat we’ll still be the earth.’

  Guilbert considers this, nods, and steps forwards through the doorway, his companion keeping close behind him in hope of safety. ‘I have no business with you or your people. Look and see: I have damaged nothing, and done you no harm.’ He holds up the letter between finger and thumb. ‘I take nothing. I borrow this. Anyone who wants it can come to the office of the Minister of the Interior and collect it.’ He shakes his head again. ‘Your friend isn’t coming back again.’ He glances down at the body of Pinon, then up. ‘Don’t suppose any of your lads wants to be a policeman, does he?’

  At this time, the saltpetre factory of Desmarets dominated the village of Joinville and the landscape around it. The meandering of the Marne brings the river almost back on itself at Joinville, and the land was mostly meadow.

  The only other building of any eminence was the Musketeer Inn. Karl Arnim had taken a room at the Musketeer, on the first floor, and from its window he could watch Joinville, and the Paris road that ran through it, and the factory.

  The factory stared back at him across the valley, a bland unadorned face with its big windows, out of place in the mediaeval fields.

  Arnim had lately taken an interest in the new method of saltpetre production, with the same wary intellect he would have devoted to learning Chinese. Instinctively he considered technical thing
s the province of artisans – paid servants – and therefore far beneath a man of quality. Factories were, in their way, even worse: commerce was even less dignified than manual skill.

  But he found himself to be a modern intelligence, untrammelled and au courant. Increasingly – and however distressing it might seem – commerce was influence; commerce was power. Commerce preoccupied Berlin, and accordingly Karl Arnim had stirred himself to understand it enough to maintain his pre-eminence, and even – discreetly, of course, through agents – to spread his money into certain prudent investments.

  Saltpetre was power too; and before they’d let the mob take over, the finer minds of France had developed new ways to produce it in quantities that were a proper concern to the chief agent of France’s enemy. So he sat in a first-floor window of the Musketeer and contemplated the factory of Desmarets as a general might a battlefield, or a cat a mouse.

  Today, though, his affair was not the factory but one particular man working in it: the locksmith Gamain. The Revolution sought him, but Arnim had found him; found him, distracted him away from the authorities with the spurious commission to Chantilly, and now come to Joinville to collect him. He had given the Ministry of the Interior a conspiracy to delight them for days, and he had given them the man Kinnaird, and the police could follow Kinnaird round and round Paris and at this critical time Joinville, and Gamain the royal locksmith, were in Prussian hands. Marinus, dear steady careful Marinus, would call at the factory shortly, and Gamain would be invited discreetly away, and then the Revolution’s vital witness in the hunt for the royal correspondence would disappear.

  Once the correspondence was secure and preferably destroyed – saving such pieces as Arnim might find useful for his own ends – he could return to Joinville and renew his study of the factory.

  Saltpetre production was hardly a sophisticated process, in any case: essentially the passing of water over excrement. He did it himself every day at a fixed hour. Trust the French to make a science and a trade out of it.

  Guilbert had set off in one direction, catching up with the men following Kinnaird. The letter he had found in Kinnaird’s hut he sent in the other direction, with a fast rider and the instruction that it be delivered immediately into Fouché’s hand.

  Guilbert smiled a little at that. The Monsieur would have his document. Guilbert would have the man.

  At the Ministry of the Interior an hour later, the reaction was all Guilbert might have hoped. The knowledge that Kinnaird was found and tracked brought a sigh of pleasure from Fouché, and the document was snatched from the courier’s hand and immediately in the centre of Fouché’s desk.

  Sir, we learn that the Revolution attaches surprising importance to a locksmith named Gamain. Surprising, although the man was at least once commissioned by the Crown, and there is speculation at the international secrets he helped to hide, reckoned likely to destroy the credibility of the King and shake Europe as well as Paris. The importance you may gauge from the prominence given to the point by a lady in her last hour. Those disposed against the Revolution might calculate the advantage should its agents be delayed or defeated in their hunt. Should more recent information emerge, and should you care for it, it will be available at the rendezvous of the wasp.

  Fouché admired the brevity. He re-read it. Then he read between its lines.

  Point the first: the man Kinnaird is active, and engaged in the affairs that most concern me.

  Point the second: a familiar phrase – a discredited King and a shaken Paris; a familiar phrase repeated for the second time. My phrase. This information has also come via Lavalier.

  Point the third: but it has not come directly from Lavalier. This correspondence is aware of Lavalier’s message to the Americans, but it is not the product of that relationship.

  Fouché felt his blood warming at the implications, and with clenched teeth and clutching fingers he urged Guilbert onwards.

  Marinus was enjoying his visit to the Desmarets factory. His letter of introduction to the manager had been waved aside, the interest of a foreign visitor credential enough. The manager was enthusiastic, and expert, and part of Marinus’s mind drifted into warm contentment at the company of another careful enquiring mind.

  And with each new figure they saw in the place, Marinus’s mind would kick at him, and he would check to see whether the figure was noticeably a locksmith.

  ‘ – things about capacity,’ the manager was saying as he ushered Marinus out of the main factory building and the sunlight glared at them, ‘is that we seem to have reached a natural limit. Temporary at least. Not the volumes that may be put through the vessels, but the way we can have the men service them.’

  They both stood still a moment, blinking hard and waiting for their eyes to adjust to the day.

  ‘Which would imply,’ Marinus said carefully, ‘an adjustment to the habits of the men or of the relationship between the men and the equipment.’

  ‘Indeed! Indeed.’

  The yard outside the main building was a large rectangular space, paved with brick, and the two of them had just stepped into one end of it. Along the right-hand side the brick gave way to grass, sloping briefly up then dropping to the Marne and Joinville itself, a shadow in the sunlit landscape. A wall ran along the left-hand side of the yard, where the factory had been built into the side of the hill to keep the ground level; the wall was perhaps ten feet high, with a low parapet along the top of it. At the far end of the yard was another building: two-storey, but substantially smaller than the factory behind them. Offices, perhaps, or stores.

  The yard was forty or fifty yards long, but Marinus could clearly see a man kneeling at the door to that other building, tools spread out on a blanket beside him, apparently working at the handle or the lock.

  They started to walk along the yard, and Marinus felt his heart hammering, the double beats matching his footsteps exactly and thumping in his chest.

  ‘The latter would mean a rearrangement of the whole plant, of course,’ the manager was saying, and Marinus heard the words distantly, like a lost innocence.

  From the direction of the river a man stepped onto the brick surface of the yard. He had something hung from a strap around his neck; a simple knife-sharpening wheel. He looked around himself, presumably seeking custom.

  ‘ – and that’s frankly impossible for another year at least.’ Still the two of them walked, footsteps on brick, heartbeats.

  With each step, the man on his knees at the lock became nearer and more distinct.

  From behind the locksmith, a cart rumbled off a track and into the yard, the sound of its wheels changing immediately it moved from earth to brick.

  The man with the knife-sharpener turned towards the locksmith.

  ‘Hey!’ the manager called, and the man hesitated. The manager started to stride towards him, Marinus following. To Marinus: ‘ – have to control those fellows. They interrupt the rhythms of the place, do you see?’

  The knife-sharpener watched them warily. The cart continued towards them, iron-shod wheels sharp on the bricks, rolling beside the high wall with a load of dung for the factory. Uncomfortably, the man with the knife-wheel pulled the strap over his head and set the device on the ground beside him. It was as if he was readying for a fight, Marinus thought. ‘Not without permission!’ the manager was calling out as they walked.

  The locksmith was a blur at the end of Marinus’s vision. He refocused on the knife-sharpener, as they came close at last.

  It was Kinnaird.

  ‘You?’ Marinus hissed. ‘But you should not be here!’

  ‘Since my first hour in France people have been saying that to me.’

  ‘Kinnaird, I urge you – ’

  ‘Stand fast!’ Guilbert striding into the yard, arm thrust towards them; beside him a policeman with musket level, two more men behind, more men coming in from beyond the building. To one of his men: ‘Get the locksmith!’

  Kinnaird was twisting in confusion. Marinus stared at hi
m. ‘Betrayal. You have brought the police to me.’

  ‘I didn’t kn-’ Now Kinnaird saw it. ‘Only because you brought them to me.’ Guilbert and his men were a loose circle around them, the manager stumbling backwards bewildered.

  ‘I would not dream – ’ And now Marinus saw it too. Saw it all, and behind it all saw Arnim, capable of a perspective and a calculation greater than any individual care.

  He nodded. Sad smile. ‘All life is betrayal.’ And then, behind it all, he really did see Arnim, standing on the parapet, staring down bleak at the scene in the yard, grasping how his scheme for the police and Kinnaird had coincided so catastrophically with his scheme for the locksmith.

  Marinus gazed up at him. His eyes did not move as he said quietly to Kinnaird, ‘His name is Karl Arnim. He is the greatest mind in Europe.’ A faint smile. ‘Today, alas, he seems to have shown a human fallibility.’ Still he gazed up.

  Oblivious to the tension between the men in the yard, the dung-cart continued its progress beside the wall towards the factory building. None saw it. Kinnaird was looking up at Arnim, and Guilbert’s eyes had followed, and now everyone was looking in the same direction. So none of them except Arnim himself – so shockingly, so distastefully, exposed for the first time – saw Marinus reach into his coat and pull out a pistol.

  They only saw it when it was pointing at Kinnaird’s chest. ‘Hold!’ from Guilbert; the lead policeman’s musket level and firm.

  Now Marinus was looking at Kinnaird. ‘At the end of any relationship there must be sacrifice,’ he said, ‘and one party is sure to suffer. I regret that we must have the parting before we had a chance at the partnership.’ Still quiet: ‘In different circumstances . . . ’

  The pistol was fixed to Kinnaird’s chest. Marinus looked up at Arnim again; he placed his left hand on his heart, and bowed. ‘God speed you, Mr Kinnaird,’ he said, and swung the pistol round and shot the man with the musket.