On catching sight of him the Prince at once beckoned him forward and, with a toothy smile, extended his right hand. Roger duly kissed it and presented the letter from Lord Grenville. Throwing it unopened on the bed de Condé exclaimed:
‘ ’Twill be time enough for us to attend to business when we have dined! The Abbé Chenier tells me that you have brought us excellent news. That dear Mr. Pitt is already thinking of our winter comfort. Such tidings are introduction enough. You have no idea, Chevalier, how we suffered last winter. The river frozen, the horses dying in the stables, and ourselves with not enough cheese in the larder to tempt a hungry mouse. You are welcome, most welcome. After France your generous nation will ever be nearest to my heart.’
As Roger murmured his thanks and bowed himself away, he wondered a little uneasily if Mr. Pitt would, in due course, furnish the funds he had invented to get rid of Montgalliard. He was inclined to hope so, as one could not but pity these people, all of whom had been born to riches and since been robbed of everything; yet their evident petty jealousy, as they each endeavoured to draw the Prince’s attention to themselves, and preoccupation with the necessities of an outmoded etiquette made him secretly despise them.
Of the latter he was to have further evidence when they went down to dinner. Had he arrived at the Court of Russia, the old Empress Catherine, for all her vast dominions, would have had him sit next to her; so that she might the sooner hear the latest news out of England. So, too, in his day would have the late Gustavus of Sweden, the Stadtholder of Holland and even Queen Caroline of Naples; but the Bourbon Princes in exile still considered that it would be demeaning themselves to have any but the bearers of ancient names near them at table. Roger found himself placed near its bottom, between another Abbé and a nephew of the Marquis de Bouillé. Both were pleasant men and the Abbé talked interestingly on the ways in which the Revolution had affected the numerous independent Prince-Bishoprics that peppered the Rhineland, but Roger was glad when the meal was over.
Soon afterwards the Abbé Chenier drew Roger aside and introduced him into the Prince’s cabinet. De Condé was already there and had just opened Grenville’s letter. It would have been contrary to etiquette for him to invite them to sit down; so looking up at Roger, he said:
This expresses only his lordship’s willingness to serve us, and states that you will convey. Mr. Pitt’s views to us on certain matters. Fire away then, and let us hear everything with which that most excellent of Ministers has charged you.’
Roger at once launched into the subject of Pichegru, but after a moment the Prince cut him short by exclaiming to the Abbé: ‘Ah, how unfortunate that de Montgalliard has already left! He knew far more of the ins and outs of this business than anyone else; and I am at a loss to see how we are to reopen negotiations with this traitor General without him.’
‘My instructions are,’ said Roger quietly, ‘that, subject to your Royal Highness’s permission, I should now take over the negotiations with General Pichegru myself.’
De Condé gave a slight shrug. ‘Since that is your Prime Minister’s wish, by all means do so. Are you acquainted with the fellow?’
‘No, Monseigneur. But that is of little importance, provided that you will make quite clear to me your intentions towards him. May I hear from your own lips the price you are prepared to pay him for marching his army on Paris and restoring the monarchy?’
The lavish list of rewards that Roger had had from Mr. Pitt was promptly reeled off by the Prince, who added with an ugly chuckle: ‘In the Chateau of Chambord there is an excellent oubliette. I hope he falls down it when drunk one night, and breaks his dirty neck.’
To Roger the wish seemed a miserably mean one, seeing that only as a result of Pichegru’s staking his own life and honour could the thousands of people who had fled from France hope to return home, and have some prospect of regaining at least a part of their former possessions. Ignoring the remark, he asked:
‘Has your Royal Highness sent these promises to the General in writing?’
‘Mort dieu, no!’ The Bourbon’s pale blue eyes popped. ‘The word of a Condé is enough.’
‘Permit me to observe, Monseigneur, that in this instance you are not dealing with a gentleman.’
‘Oh! Ah! Well! Yes! I see your point Chevalier. If you wish, then, I will give you written particulars of the proffered bribe.’
‘I thank your Royal Highness. And now,’ went on Roger—for this most delicate of questions sliding behind the shadow of Mr. Pitt—’as a matter of form my master charged me to enquire if you, Monseigneur, had authority from His Royal Highness the Comte de Provence to offer these terms?’
‘You refer to His Most Christian Majesty King Louis XVIII,’ the Prince replied with sudden sharpness.
For a moment Roger was taken aback. He knew that young King Louis XVII was dead, and he had told Amanda how the boy had died; but he had the most excellent reasons for supposing that they were the only people in the world who possessed that knowledge. De Condés sharp rebuke must mean that, although Mr. Pitt had omitted to tell him of it, the child in the Temple, whom only Barras, Fouché, and perhaps now a few others, knew to have been substituted for the little King, had also died. Recovering himself, he said hastily:
‘Your pardon, Monseigneur. In England we have been used for so long to refer to His Majesty by his former title.’
The Prince shrugged. ‘No matter. Your slip was understandable and you may set your master’s mind at rest about my powers. For reasons of health His Majesty is now at Mitau on the Baltic, and ‘Monsieur’ his brother at present has only a small force under him in the island of Yeu off the coast of Brittany. Therefore, as Commander-in-Chief of the Royal and Catholic Army, I have been invested by His Majesty with full authority to act in his name, and use any and every means seemingly good to me which may assist in restoring his dominions to him.’
Roger bowed. ‘Then it remains, Monseigneur, only for me to ask when the Comte de Montgalliard had his last interview with General Pichegru, and the outcome of it?’
De Condé guffawed and the Abbé gave a wheezy titter. Then the former said: ‘The Count was far too wily a bird to go poking his own head into such a hornet’s nest as a Republican headquarters. He employed a Swiss named Fauche-Borel to do his dirty work for him. You know the Count’s cat’s-paw better than I, Abbé. Tell the Chevalier about him.’
His great paunch wobbling with laughter, the Abbé proceeded. ‘Fauche-Borel is a common little man who has made a modest fortune as a bookseller in Neuchâtel. He is the veriest snob that ever was born, and his one ambition is to hob-nob with the aristocracy. The Revolution gave him his opportunity. Many persons of quality took refuge over the Swiss border, and by trading on their urgent need of money Fauche-Borel ingratiated himself with a number of them. How de Montgalliard came across him I do not know; but the Count brought him here and, after making His Royal Highness privy to the use to which he was to be put, asked that he should be received. On being permitted to kiss the hand of a Prince of the Blood he nearly fainted with emotion; but it made him our willing slave, and it is he who on several occasions has gone through the enemy lines to discuss matters personally with General Pichegru.’
Roger would have given a lot to have said: ‘You dirty cowards; how dare you, on account of his simplicity, despise this brave little man,’ but disciplined tact of years restrained him; and, keeping the cold contempt from his voice with an effort, he asked: ‘Where is this person now?’
‘As far as I know, he is in Paris,’ replied the Abbé. ‘I gathered that General Pichegru asked him to go there and endeavour to find out what support might be expected for a counter revolutionary movement by the Army.’
That was bad hews for Roger, as it confirmed the reason Mr. Pitt had given for Pichegru’s hesitation in declaring his adherence to the Royalist cause; and meant that he, Roger, would probably have to follow Fauche-Borel to the capital on a similar mission, as the only means of bringing about the cond
itions which would induce the General to act. Still thinking about the Swiss bookseller, he muttered:
‘As well send a sheep into a den of lions.’ Then he added more briskly: ‘However, that is none of my business. If your Royal Highness will be good enough to append your own signature to a document stating the terms of the offer to Pichegru, I will set out this evening on an attempt to carry it to him.’
The Prince yawned, belched mildly, stood up and said: ‘Draw up the document now, Abbé, append my seal to it and bring it up to my bedroom. I am weary after the chase and must have my rest, but will sign it before I sleep.’ Turning his protuberant blue eyes on Roger, he went on: ‘I regret that you should have to leave us so soon, Chevalier; but it is in a good cause, and I trust your absence will be only temporary. I shall pray for your safety and success; and can assure you that we shall all be a dither with anxiety until we can make you doubly welcome on your return.’
Roger let the glib lies flow over him, and again kissed the beringed hand that the Prince extended. Whatever his luck with Pichegru, he had no intention of returning to anyone except, God willing, Mr. Pitt and in due course, Amanda. Two hours later he drove away from the Schloss in his coach, soberly aware that the really dangerous part of his mission had now begun.
19
The Treachery of General Pichegru
Although Roger had given the Abbé Chenier the impression that he meant to penetrate the enemy lines that night, he did not mean to do so. For one thing he was badly in need of a good night’s sleep, and felt that, urgent as coming to an understanding with General Pichegru might be, the delay of a few hours would be more than compensated for by renewed freshness when he entered Mannheim and would need all his wits about him.
Had the atmosphere at de Condé’s headquarters been more congenial to him he would have slept there; but the sight of the servile nobles and unctuous priests had so sickened him that solitude at a wayside inn seemed definitely preferable.
He had also to rid himself of his coach and the two coachmen. Although most Belgians had now become antagonistic towards the French owing to the extortions inflicted on them by the Republican Commissioners, when first the so-called ‘Army of Liberation’ had invaded the country, the masses in the towns had received them with open arms; and Roger had no means of knowing for certain whether his two men were ardent revolutionaries or reactionaries. True, they had not betrayed him when he had pretended to be a doctor in order to get through the French outposts, but if left either at the Schloss or in Mannheim they might have endangered his future operations by gossiping, in the one case about his use of fluent French while posing as Citizen Breuc on the journey from Brussels, and in the other by letting out that he had been at the headquarters of the émigrés; so the best means of insuring against both these eventualities was to pay them off at some lonely place on the road, where he could also sleep.
The Abbé had provided him with a laissez-passer; so he had no difficulty with the occasional patrols of Austrians in the back areas who challenged the coach, and four hours of good driving brought them to the little town of Sinsheim. As it was by then ten o’clock, he began to look out for a likely place in which to spend the night, and a few miles beyond the town, on the crest of a long slope up which the horses had had to be walked, they came to a fair sized inn.
It was in darkness; but getting out, he knocked up the landlord: a fat German who came down and opened the door. Roger asked him if he had a bedroom free, and a riding horse he could sell in the morning.
The man said that he was welcome to a room, but a horse was another matter. For the past week the Austrians had been commandeering every horse to be had in those parts, and three days before had taken all four of the horses he had had in his stable.
Realising that enquiries elsewhere were unlikely to have better results, Roger decided to use the off-lead from the team drawing the coach; but he said nothing about that for the moment, simply telling the Belgians that he meant to lie at the inn for the night and that after they had drunk as much beer as they wanted they could for once enjoy a long sleep. As they had slept most of the day they were now less tired than he was, but ample beer and a snug corner in a hay-loft over their animals was to them a pleasant enough prospect, so they thanked him and drove the coach into the yard of the inn.
At six o’clock Roger woke after an excellent night, dressed and went downstairs to find the landlord already about; so he asked him for pen and paper, and if he could sell him a saddle. The man produced the writing materials from a cupboard and said that he had several saddles so would be willing to part with one for a fair price.
While breakfast was being prepared Roger wrote out an instruction to the owner of the coach to pay to the two coachmen the big deposit he had left on it; then, after making a good meal, accompanied by the landlord, he went out to the stable. Some gold pieces soon induced the Belgians to surrender the off-lead horse, and he added a handsome pourboire to the chit entitling them to the deposit; so the parting was effected with goodwill on both sides.
By seven-thirty he was on his way to Mannheim, with the small valise strapped to the back of his saddle. In addition to the few things he had bought in Brussels, it now contained the uniform of a private in the emigre army, which he had asked the Abbé Chenier to provide for him after their talk with de Condé the previous afternoon.
His return through the war zone was almost devoid of risk, as the units of both armies were scattered over a wide area, and even when he got to within a few miles of Mannheim he heard only the occasional shots of snipers in the distance. The sight of his laissez-passer was enough for the Austrian pickets to wave him on, then when he came to the French he told the simple truth—that he was on his way to General Pichegru—and taking him for a Frenchman they directed him towards the city.
He entered it at one o’clock in the afternoon, stabled his horse at the Drei Könige and took an attic there, which, owing to the crowded state of the town, was the best the hotel could do for him. In it he changed into the émigré uniform, put on his long, dark multi-caped coat over it, then went downstairs, wrote a brief note, slipped it into his pocket and walked along to the Rathaus.
There were sentries on its entrances, but evidently only as a formality, for among the officers constantly going in and out there was an occasional civilian, and none of them was being challenged. All the same Roger knew that once inside he might very well come out of it as a prisoner on his way to be shot; so he had to make a conscious effort to appear entirely carefree as he ran up the steps and walked through its main door.
In the stone-flagged hall beyond, a sergeant stopped him, and asked his business. With an indignant air he declared that he, a citizen of the glorious French Republic, had been cheated and insulted the night before in a brothel, and had come to demand that the dirty Germans who ran the place should be taught a lesson.
This was a complaint with which the sergeant could sympathise, and he directed Roger up a staircase to the right, saying that he would find the Provost-Marshal’s office on the second floor. Roger had felt confident that it would be somewhere in the building, but he had no intention of going to it. On reaching the first floor he turned right along the principal corridor, hoping that now he was free to roam the place he would be able to locate the General without having actually to ask for him.
Pichegru’s headquarters bore not the slightest resemblance to de Condé’s. Here there were no lackeys, no priests, no respectful hush at the approach of prominent personalities. The place was as busy as a bee-hive, and it was the constant bustle of officers, clerks and orderlies hurrying to and fro which enabled Roger to move about quite freely without risk of being questioned further.
After a time he came upon a minstrels’ gallery which overlooked the great hall in the centre of the building. It was obviously there that in times of peace the wealthier merchants of Mannheim periodically gorged themselves at civic banquets; but it had now been turned into a huge mess. Here again, in str
iking contrast to His Royal Highness’s dinners, duly announced by a gentleman who rapped sharply with a rod on the parquet floor of a salon, and served to the minute each day, there was no trace whatever of formality. The service appeared to be in perpetual session; officers, some clean and others filthy, marched in and plumped themselves down where they would, the waiters put plates piled high with food in front of them, they ate voraciously, often not even exchanging a word with their neighbours, then marched out again.
Here and there among them was a civilian official, and it was their presence which caused Roger his greatest anxiety. At the Schloss he had stood within a few feet of three noblemen with whom he had been acquainted in the past, and a fourth whom he had been instrumental in saving from the guillotine; but a combination of his false name, changed appearance and the execrable French he had then been using deliberately, had protected him from recognition. Whereas now, should he come face to face with one of his ex-colleagues of the Revolution, he would have to rely solely on his moustache and whiskers.
Worse still, many of them had seen him about Paris for far longer than he had been known to any of the Prince de Condé’s gentlemen, and he had reason to believe that there were at least two men at this headquarters whom he had special reason to dread. They were the Citizens Rewbell and Merlin of Thionville, two out of the three Représentants en Mission, sent by the Convention to keep an eye on Pichegru, and with both of whom Roger had sat on Committees.
For a long time he sat up in a corner of the deserted gallery watching the scene in the banqueting hall below, and feeling certain that sooner or later the General would come in to have a meal there. At length, at close on five o’clock, his patience was rewarded. A tall, handsome man in his early thirties came swaggering in with Citizen Merlin beside him and followed by half a dozen other officers. From the circumstances of his arrival and the description Roger had received, he knew at once that the tall officer must be Pichegru.
The Dark Secret of Josephine Page 35