‘Yes, my lord.'
‘Well, the other commissioners fully understand their position. Your part will be to use your knowledge of the French Court and the French ministers to establish relations, and to give the commissioners an understanding of the best way to proceed, and of course to persuade where persuasion is possible. It's a matter of some delicacy, but His Majesty has every confidence in you, Sir Allen. You are acquainted with Vergennes, I understand?'
‘Yes, my lord.'
‘Well, I'll tell you something that he won't - the French are deep in debt over this war. Their man Necker raised the money for it by taking loans, instead of raising the taxes, and that means capital and interest repayments that will hobble the French for years to come. They'll be far more eager for peace than we will, so that they can retire and lick their wounds, which means we can make demands with a certain confidence. We might come out of this dreadful business more comfortably than we could have hoped.'
‘I understand, my lord.'
‘I'm sure you do. Subtlety, tact - keep the Frogs guessing. You know your way around Versailles - use that knowledge, and His Majesty will be suitably grateful.'
‘Yes, my lord,' said Allen.
‘I wish you did not have to go,' Jemima said as she helped with the hasty packing of Allen's trunk for the journey. 'A sea-crossing in the middle of winter—'
‘Yes,' he stopped her. 'But since it must be, there's no use repining. And I dare say His Majesty will be suitably grateful.’
Jemima snorted derision. 'What can he give you? Another title?’
Allen grinned at her sturdy contempt for the treasures of this world. 'He might make me a baronet. But of course, you've been a countess in your time, and it would be nothing to you. Still, Edward might like to have a title to inherit.'
‘Edward has more sense,' Jemima said robustly. 'And how glad I am, now, that he decided to leave Oxford. He will be a comfort to me while you are away. Oh Allen—' Her lip trembled as her resolve gave way for a moment, and he hastened to hold her.
‘Now, my love,' he said. 'It won't be for long. A few months at the most.'
‘Promise you'll come back as soon as you can?'
‘Of course I will, simpleton.' She laughed at the address and went back to her packing.
‘And when you come back,' she said, 'we shall have to get down to doing something serious about the servant problem. You really can't go away again without a proper trained manservant.' Oxhey, the butler, had looked so alarmed at the prospect of the journey that Allen had excused him and was to take the young footman Peter to attend him, but he had no one to teach him his duties except his master.
‘I don't intend to be going away much after this,' Allen said soothingly.
‘All the same, you'll be the only man in Versailles who has to tie his own necktie,' she grumbled.
‘It will give me a kind of distinction,' Allen smiled.
*
The preliminary articles of the peace were signed on 3o November 1782, but all through the Christmas celebrations the talks went on in the background to prepare the first definitive treaty for signature in January. Had he not been an early riser and accustomed to hard work, Allen might have found himself without any time to enjoy being back in France, but as it was, he was able to renew old acquaintance, hunt in the forests, enjoy social gatherings, and even visit Paris.
It was strange to be back in Versailles, and it wove its old familiar spell around him, despite the years gone past, and the change of monarch. There were the extraordinary contrasts which he had forgotten - the stiff, formal etiquette on the surface, and the licentiousness underneath; the gilded furniture, the mirrors and crystal chandeliers, the carpets and rich hangings of the public rooms, compared with the cramped and unsanitary accommodation which many of the inmates endured; the fabulous clothes and jewels, the powdered wigs and bare bosoms and splendour of Court gatherings, and the flea-ridden servants, the bedbugs and cockroaches, the stinking privies, and heaps of ordure in corners.
But it was all part of the teeming, exotic life of the richest Court in the world, and Allen loved it, though he knew that it could only be tolerable as a relish, not as a constancy. As a commissioner sent from the King of England, he was given much better quarters than he had ever had before, and two Versailles servants were sent to attend him in addition to his own man, who, to his embarrassed surprise, was allotted a servant of his own. ‘That's the way it is here,' Allen told him soothingly. 'At Versailles even the servants have servants.' The King -Louis XVI - received him kindly, though vaguely, as he seemed to do everything. He had none of the majesty of his glittering predecessors, and in his plain brown coat and wig, with his pop-eyes and fat kindly face, he looked more like a country lawyer than a king.
But the little Austrian queen, Marie-Antoinette, made up for it. Tiny, dainty, pretty, and dressed always in exquisite, frilled, and glittering splendour, she dashed about like a dragonfly from one pleasure to the next, gracing every occasion she presided over, filling the rooms of the fairytale palace with laughter and chatter. She had provided the King with a son and a daughter, her other children having died in infancy, and they had now reached a modus vivendi by which they went their own ways, but met on terms of affectionate respect.
Allen renewed his acquaintance with the King's sister, Madame Elisabeth, who was proving a good companion for the Queen, and his mad old aunts, and many of the courtiers of the previous age who had survived into the new reign. But the happiest of his reunions were with officers of the Royal Ecossais with whom he had served in his years of exile. At the house of the Maréchal Macdonald, he met a handsome young colonel of the new generation, a Colonel de Murphy, who was very eager to make his acquaintance, and hastened to invite him to a supper party at his house on the Rue St Anne on the following day.
‘I shall have one or two interesting people for you to meet,' de Murphy told him. 'The de Lameth brothers will be there, and the Comte de Mirabeau has promised to look in on his way from the Palais Royale, so I think you will not lack amusement. My wife is very interested in the new ideas, sir, of the philosophes - you have come across them, perhaps?'
‘I believe I understand you, sir,' Allen said. 'I have read Newton's Principia, and some of the work of John Locke. But I must say that I am a plain man, and too busy about the affairs of my estate to have leisure for philosophy.’
He and the Colonel met each other's eye with perfect understanding, and Meurice gave a wry smile.
‘And I, sir, am a plain soldier. But—' a very Gallic shrug. Women must have their little fancies, it said.
When Allen was shown in to the drawing room on the appointed day at the appointed hour, he found that there were several other officers of his acquaintance present, some young people he had seen about Versailles, and also someone he had been half expecting to meet round every corner since his arrival. A tall man, dark-haired, blue-eyed, with a very Morland cast of features, growing a little heavy about the middle now - he must be, Allen made a quick calculation, thirty-five or -six - came forward eagerly to claim his acquaintance and attention with a hearty shake of the hand and a smile that Allen found a little disturbing, because it reminded him of Jemima.
‘You are acquainted with Monsieur le Comte de Strathord,' said Meurice de Murphy in a tone halfway between question and statement. Allen bowed assent.
‘Not so well as I would like,' Henri said. 'Our acquaintance has been - shall we say - oblique. But I hope we will make up for it now, sir.'
‘I knew your grandmother very well,' Allen said, rather bemused. Marie-Louise's child, he thought to himself; the Princess's baby, whom I brought here myself, before he was weaned, a little, mewling, orphaned scrap of an infant; now grown to this large and well-fed and - to judge from his clothes - wealthy man. The effects of the passage of time are always a little bewildering when one comes across them suddenly. During his last visit to Paris, when he had attended Aliena to discuss the matter of the pension with her, he ha
d met the boy briefly when he had arrived home while Allen was still there. Aliena had introduced them, and they had shaken hands, and the boy had looked at him rather coldly and distantly. Otherwise he had seen him only in passing when they had happened to be at Court at the same time, and a bow or nod had sufficed. It was strange, therefore, to be claimed with such enthusiasm as an old friend. If challenged, Allen could not even have said whether the boy knew who he was, and why he had visited his grandmother.
‘Grandmother spoke very highly of you,' Henri said, drawing Allen aside from the press of guests. 'I know she valued your friendship and your judgement, and I suspect she probably confided in you her disappointment in me.' Allen murmured something polite. Was this what was at the bottom? Did the man think Allen would recommend the pension to be stopped?
‘Yes, yes, it is true. It is useless to deny it. I caused my dear grandmother much unhappiness, which grieves me now to think of it. But I loved her dearly, sir, and I beg you to believe it.'
‘I have no reason to do otherwise,' Allen said cautiously. ‘I'm sure you have every reason,' Henri replied, with that disturbing smile. 'I cannot doubt that Grandmother told you of my wicked ways, of how I gambled and drank and accumulated debts and generally attempted to ruin myself, and her with me. But I have been trying to make up for it in the past few years, and as I hope you may be able to discern from my appearance, I have found the means to keep myself respectably, and to provide for my child.'
‘Your child?' Allen felt a twinge of dismay at the words. So there was a sprig, was there, of this renegade branch? He knew how Aliena had felt about it, how she had hoped the twist of the thread would end with her daughter, how distressed she had been when that daughter produced a bastard of her own. And if, now, this bastard had done likewise - for he spoke of keeping a child, but not a wife - the twist might never be unravelled. He pulled himself together. 'I was not aware, sir, that you were married.'
‘My wife is dead,' he said bleakly. 'She died in childbirth of a son, who also died. My daughter is all I have. Would you do me the honour of coming upstairs now and seeing her?'
‘Upstairs? And now?' Allen could not conceal his surprise.
‘The de Murphys are my greatest friends, and since my wife died it has been most convenient for my daughter to live under their roof. They know that I mean to ask you, and have no objection to our leaving the company for a few minutes.’
There was nothing Allen could do, in that case, but bow his assent, though as he followed Henri from the room he was wondering why Henri wanted him to see the child, and coming up with no answer but the pension.
On the second floor at the back of the house, a suite of rooms had been put at the disposal of the little girl, and Henri knocked on a door, listened, and led Allen into a very pretty sitting room all done out in blue and white, and far too formal an environment for the little girl who was led forward by a starched maid, and who dropped a very practised curtsey to the two visitors.
eloise, ma chère, viens ici. veux to presenter a Monsieur le Chevalier de Morland.' Henri held out his hand, and the little girl came and took it and looked up solemnly at Allen. She was five, going on six, a diminutive, self-possessed woman, for the more liberal attitudes to children had not yet reached France, dressed in a stiffbodiced, wide-skirted, much ruffled version of a grown woman's dress. Her hair was dark, and curled and ringleted elaborately; her features were strongly marked, too much so for prettiness at this age, though Allen thought she would grown into her looks; most startling to him were the large, dark eyes, so dark they looked almost black, and oddly melancholy. He had seen those eyes before, in life, and in many and many a portrait. Here, five years old, brought up in obscurity, and destined, he hoped, to remain so, was perhaps the last small sprig of the Royal House of Stuart.
‘Monsieur de Morland,' Henri was saying, translating the introduction into English, 'may I present to you my daughter Henrietta Louisa Stuart? Owing to the difficulties she had in pronouncing her own name when she first learned to talk, she has come to be known as Héloïse.' The child curtseyed again, and continued to cling to her father's hand and to stare at Allen with those sad-monkey eyes. 'She does not yet speak very much English,' Henri had continued, 'though I am at pains to teach her, for I think it is an accomplishment that will be of use to her.'
‘Languages are always useful, sir,' Allen said, wondering if they were coming to the nub of the matter. ‘Certainly,' Henri assented, still in English, 'and I hope that when she is older, my daughter may be able to visit England - now, thank God, our two countries are at peace again.’
He sent the child back to her nurse, and turned away with Allen for privacy, relasping into French as he sought to be eloquent.
‘You have been patient, sir, and no doubt you have been wondering why I brought you here, what it is I want from you. Simply, it is this: I want a family. My grandmother isolated me from her own people, as if I were a disease that might infect them.' He shrugged. 'I understand her feelings, though I do not agree with them. But consider, sir, that innocent child you have just seen. Should she be punished for something not her fault, over which she had no control?'
‘But how is she punished?' Allen asked.
‘She suffers with me. I have no brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles, no cousins - at least, none that will own me. And so, neither has my daughter. That is a sad thing for a child - I know from my own experience how lonely a life she will lead.’
Henri turned his head to look at the child, and irresistibly Allen looked too. The little girl stood watching them with those sad Stuart eyes: great-grandchild of a King, grandchild of Marie-Louise, whom he had loved long ago. She looked very small and vulnerable, dwarfed by her elaborate clothes and the too-elegant room.
‘And what is it you want me to do?' Allen asked at length.
‘Make representation for me to the family; help me to be reconciled with them, so that, when she is a little older, my daughter may go to England and be received by them.'
‘You don't know what you are asking,' Allen said. No-one knows of your existence, except for your grandmother's cousin, who pays your pension. It would involve explanations which would be painful, difficult, perhaps even destructive.'
‘The story is an old one,' Henri said persuasively. ‘There cannot be anyone alive now who would he directly affected by it.'
‘There are many such,' Allen said shortly.
‘Sir, I ask you to consider my request, to think about it, perhaps to discuss it with my benefactor. That's all. That would not be against your conscience, would it?'
‘It would have to be discussed with Lord Chelmsford,' Allen said. 'But I cannot say—'
‘Please, sir - just think about it. Now you have seen my child.'
‘Very well,' Allen said at last. 'I will consider it. I cannot promise more.'
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you.' He sounded genuinely grateful and relieved, and Allen began to think that perhaps he had misjudged the man, perhaps he really had turned over a new leaf. The idea was strengthened when they left to rejoin the party below and Henri turned back for one last look at the little girl, for the smile he exchanged with his daughter was one of real love.
*
The news of the January treaty was known in America in March 1783. Independence was granted to the thirteen United States; Canada was to remain British, Florida Spanish, the Mississippi was to be open to British and American ships and traders; the British army was to be evacuated with all convenient speed; the American army was to be paid and disbanded. Peace had come to America at last.
But there had been many who suffered: fishermen who could not ply their trade during the blockade had lost their livelihood; rising prices had afflicted those on salaries, and the poor who did not grow their own food; patriotic landowners who had supported the army had suffered, and the debilitating paper currency affected everyone. Only the merchants and financiers had done well out of the war, and in Maryland some merchants had done so su
spiciously well that the Assembly ruled no merchant could represent the state in Congress.
And then there was the question of what to do about those who had remained loyal to Britain through the war. A clause in the treaty provided that they should not be put to death, but otherwise they were at the mercy of the victors, and loss of all civil rights, confiscation of property, and summary banishment from their state was their lot. The Patriots regarded them with bitter hatred, and it was an uneasy time, when it was only natural that some came to feel the end had not been worth the gaining.
Charles's feelings about the end of the war were mainly relief that it was all over and that there would no longer be those terrible decisions to make, that tore him in two. He might even, he realized, renew contact with the family, now that England was no longer the enemy. He could write to Jemima, find out what had happened to Flora; contact Angus and perhaps even arrange for his portion of his father's estate to be realized and sent to him. Money - more especially gold - would be more than welcome at the moment, and if Angus had been doing well, which seemed likely, he might be only too glad to buy Charles out.
He thought of these things as he trudged along the riverbank in the heat of a June morning, with his gun under his arm, in case he spotted anything worth eating, and his gun dog at his heels. Everything looked very beautiful at this time of year, before the greens had burnt out to brown. The tall trees were deep in blue shadows, swaying gently against the copper-blue sky, and across the river there were perpetual scurryings and dartings, as life reached its crescendo. A heavy splash was probably an otter slipping away from the sound of his dog brushing the reeds; that small circle of spreading ripples would be a water rat. The river had a heavy, peppery smell which for him was the quintessence of summer, a smell of mallow and weed and rich mud - it must be that smell which intoxicated the ducks at this time of year. Here and there clouds of tiny insects jigged madly on the spot, and sapphire dragonflies quivered in the sunshine and joined their hinder ends delicately.
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