The ancient fortress of the kings of France had risen suddenly out of the night, grim and uncared-for, its towers demolished now to the level of the walls. Two only remained intact, the village tower bestriding the ancient drawbridge, and the enormous square keep, its dark bulk rising high above the bare trees, flanked by its four corner turrets. Vincennes was an arsenal, its storehouses guarded by veterans no longer fit for active service and a handful of regular troops, but it was also a state prison and the keep itself was strongly fortified.
Yet now it stood, silent within the circle of its curtain wall, cut off on the right hand by the barbican from the wide, white courtyard where the snow-covered piles of ammunition were like odd, conical cream cakes. Opposite was the derelict chapel, beautiful in the frayed lacework of crumbling stone, decaying slowly because no one thought of repairing it, a precious jewel to St Louis but neglected now, in these days of little faith. And Marianne searched her mind in vain for any reason for this audience, held in the secrecy of this rotting fortress with its sinister reputation. Why Vincennes? Why at night?
At a little distance, a noble pair of twin pavilions faced each other, evoking memories of the Grand Siècle of Louis XIV, although they had fared no better than the rest of the buildings. Panes of glass were missing from the windows, the mouldings of the mansard roofs were broken and the walls seamed with cracks. Yet it was towards the left-hand one of these two that Gracchus, acting on Vidocq's instructions, now turned his horses.
There was a faint light showing on the ground floor, behind the blackened windows. The chaise stopped, and Vidocq jumped out.
'Come,' he said. 'You are expected.'
Marianne looked about her in surprise, her eyes taking in the dismal, comfortless dilapidation of her surroundings. Hugging her black, sable-lined cloak more tightly round her, she pulled the furred hood closer round her face as a biting wind whistled across the court, whipping up handfuls of snow and making her eyes water. Marianne made her way slowly into a tiled vestibule which still retained some traces of a former splendour. The first thing that met her eyes was Rustan. Enveloped in a huge, bright red greatcoat with nothing but the top of his white turban showing above the turned-up collar, the Mameluke was striding up and down on the uneven floor, beating his arms together for warmth. At the sight of Marianne, however, he made haste to open for her the door outside which he had been keeping his energetic guard. At last, Marianne found herself face-to-face with Napoleon.
The Emperor was standing beneath the canopy of an immense hearth on which the better part of a large tree trunk was burning briskly. He was staring down at the flames, one booted foot resting on the hearthstone, one hand behind his back, the other thrust into the breast of his long, grey redingote. His shadow, topped by the curved silhouette of his plain, black cocked hat, innocent of any adornment, stretched fantastically, reared up to the carved and caissoned ceiling on which flakes of the old gilding still remained. That shadow alone sufficed to fill the great empty room, bare of all furnishings except for the frayed ends of ancient tapestries on the walls and a few heaps of rubble on the floor.
He watched, thoughtful and expressionless, as Marianne sank into her formal curtsy, then beckoned her to the fire.
'Come and warm yourself,' he said. 'It's horribly cold tonight.'
In silence, Marianne moved forward and held out her ungloved hands to the blaze, jerking her head back as she did so to let the fur hood slide back from her face. The two of them stood for a moment without speaking, looking down at the dancing flames and letting the warmth seep into their bodies. At last, Napoleon glanced quickly at the girl beside him.
'Angry with me?' he asked, his eyes fixed a little uneasily on the delicate, unsmiling profile, with its lowered lashes and straight lips.
Marianne did not look at him as she answered:
'I should not allow myself to be angry with you, Sire. One is not angry with the master of Europe.'
'Yet that is precisely what you are. And I can scarcely find it in me to blame you. You thought you were going, didn't you? You meant to cut the threads binding you to a life you would be done with, wipe out the past, eliminate everything that had been…'
The green eyes were turned on him then, the faintest twinkle of laughter in their depths. Really, he was the most extraordinary play actor! It was so like him to try and work himself into a rage when he knew that he was in the wrong.
'You need not try to generate an anger which you do not feel, Sire. I am too well acquainted with… Your Majesty. Now that I am here, perhaps Your Majesty will deign to forget whatever it was I meant to do and explain the strange things which have happened in the past months. Dare I admit that I have been very much in the dark, and remain so to this present, indeed?'
'I had not thought you unintelligent?'
'I hope not, Sire. But it would seem that Your Majesty's policies are somewhat too involved for a woman's brain to grasp. And I am not ashamed to admit that I have been able to make nothing of what your judges and your press have been referring to as the "Beaufort affair"… unless it is that an innocent man has suffered unjustly and faced death a dozen times merely to give one of your agents the pleasure and the glory of helping him to escape at last, with your blessing and under the supervision of your imperial navy… and I myself have nearly died of grief! And now, to crown all, you have me brought here by force…'
'Oh ho! Such force!'
'Very well. Against my will, if you prefer. But why?'
Napoleon roused himself from his thoughtful pose and, turning to Marianne, said gravely:
'So that justice may be done, Marianne, and seen to be done by you.'
'Justice?'
'Yes, justice. I have always known that Jason Beaufort was in no way guilty, either of the murder of Nicolas Mallerousse or of anything else. The worst he had done was to take some champagne and burgundy out of France for the delectation of a set of persons whose enjoyment gives me personally no great pleasure. But I had to lay hands on the malefactors – the real malefactors, that is, without destroying the delicate balance of my foreign policies. And in order to achieve that, it was necessary to play the game out to the end.'
'And to risk to the end the possibility that Jason Beaufort might die of his sufferings or the inhuman treatment of your prison guards.'
'I saw to it that he had a guardian angel, and by God! he seems to have done his work well! I had to catch the criminals, I tell you… and then there was that matter of the forged English money which forced me to act or else become a laughing-stock, and incidentally reveal too much about the workings of my own secret service.'
By now, curiosity was to some extent overcoming Marianne's first resentment:
'You say, Your Majesty, that it was necessary for you to catch the criminals? May I ask if you have them now?'
Napoleon merely nodded, but Marianne persisted:
'Your Majesty knows who killed Nicolas Mallerousse, who is the coiner?'
'I know who killed Nicolas Mallerousse and I have him fast, as for the coining…'
He paused and glanced at Marianne's strained face as though undecided. Thinking it advisable to give him some encouragement, she said: 'Was it not the same man?'
'No. The coiner was… myself.'
Marianne could not have been more thoroughly stunned had the ancient ceiling fallen on her head. She stared at the Emperor as if she had begun to doubt his sanity!
'You, Sire?'
'I. My idea was to strike a blow at English commerce by producing, in the strictest secrecy, a large amount of English currency and flooding the market with it. I have no idea how the villains who stowed them on Jason Beaufort's vessel managed to get hold of them, but one thing is certain: they were mine… though I could equally certainly not proclaim the fact. That is why I allowed suspicion to remain on your friend, while in and out of prisons everywhere in France my agents were working in the dark to unravel the truth. It was for the same reason that I had his reprieve made out in a
dvance and laid the best plans I could for his escape. That could not fail. Vidocq is a clever man… and I had no doubt that you would give him a hand.'
'Truly, Sire, we are small things in your hands. I begin to wonder whether a man of genius is a blessing of the gods – or a calamity! But, Sire' – she went on, a note of anxiety in her voice, 'this criminal – or criminals?'
'You are right to say criminals, for there are a number of them, but they have a leader, and this leader – but no – come with me.'
'Whereto?'
To the keep. I have something to show you. But wrap yourself warmly.'
He stooped to pick up Marianne's gloves which she had dropped on the hearth and himself settled the hood once more over her head, his hands reverting instinctively to the old, caressing gestures with which, during those enchanted days they had spent together at the Trianon, he had been used to put on her cloak for her and drape the scarf about her hair. Just as he had done then, he took her arm and led her outside, signing to Rustan to follow as he passed.
Out in the open, the icy wind whirled about them but, leaning close together, they plunged across the vast courtyard, up to their ankles in the snow which crunched beneath their feet. They came to the barbican before the keep and Napoleon made her go before him through the low archway, guarded by two sentries so rigid they might have been frozen stiff. Even their moustaches had icicles on them. On the far side, Napoleon held her back suddenly. In the light of the lantern which hung by an iron bracket from the wall, his blue-grey eyes were very grave, even stern, but there was no hardness in them.
'What you are going to see will be very horrible, Marianne… and altogether exceptional. But, let me say it again, justice must be done. Are you ready to look at what I would show you?'
She met his eyes unflinchingly:
'I am ready.'
He took her hand and drew her forward. They passed through another low arch and found themselves at the foot of the keep, standing on a plank bridge spanning the wide, deep moat. There was a wooden staircase going down into the moat and Marianne looked down, automatically, to where some lanterns were moving about below, to draw back almost immediately with a choking gasp of horror. There, in the trampled snow at the foot of the empty moat, with a guard standing on either side of it, was a sinister wooden framework, like a hideous window made of red-painted wood, with a great triangular blade at its upper end. The guillotine.
Marianne stared at the ghastly instrument with eyes dilated with horror. She was trembling so violently that Napoleon pulled her gently within the circle of his arm and held her close.
'It is dreadful, I know. And none can loathe that fearful thing more than I…'
'Then why…'
'Because it is fitting. In a short while, a man is going to die. He is waiting now in a cell inside the keep and no one, apart from those few who will be present at his execution, will ever know that it took place here tonight, just as no one will ever know how he was condemned. But the fact is that this man is a criminal of an altogether exceptional kind, such a wretch as is rarely found. Last summer, he lured Nicolas Mallerousse into a trap and, with the help of his accomplices, had him carried, gagged and bound to the house at Passy where Jason Beaufort was living at that time, and where he thereafter cold-bloodedly cut his throat. But this killing was only one of his many crimes. Some dozens of my own troops, held captive on the English hulks, have died, torn to pieces by the hounds which this man trained to track them down…'
Marianne had known, ever since Napoleon had told her that he held the criminal, that this was what she would hear. For her own part, she had known for so long that it was he who had killed Nicolas. Yet even now, she found it hard to believe that a man of his diabolical cunning could have allowed himself to be caught. Napoleon's last words, however, had thrown a blinding light even on this.
One doubt, stronger than all reason, Marianne had still:
'Sire! Are you sure that this time there is no mistake?'
He stiffened, embracing her in a glance that was suddenly ice-cold:
'You do not mean to ask me to pardon him, now?'
'God forbid, Sire!… if it is he, indeed!'
'Come. I will show him to you.'
They entered the keep, passed by the guard-room, its door shut for once, and climbed the fine spiral staircase up to the first floor where they emerged into a gothic chamber, the four bays of the roof supported on a massive central pillar. Here, a warder was on guard, and with him was Vidocq, whose tall figure bent double at the sight of the Emperor. At each corner of the room was a heavy, iron-bound door, leading to the cells which occupied the four corner turrets. Napoleon made a sign to the warder:
'Open the hatch. Try not to make a noise. This lady desires to see the prisoner.'
The man walked over to one of the corner turret doors, opened a small judas window and bowed.
'Go on,' Napoleon told Marianne. 'Look.'
She went, reluctantly, over to the door, both wanting and fearing what she would see, yet fearing most of all to find herself looking at a strange face, the face of some poor wretch who, by one of those sleights of hand at which they were so adept, had somehow been substituted for the real criminal.
The circular cell was lit by a lantern standing on a stool. A fire crackled cheerfully in the conical hearth, but the man who lay at full-length on the bed wore chains on his wrists and ankles. Marianne needed no second look to tell her that this was indeed the man whom she had both hoped and feared to see. It was Francis Cranmere, the man whose name she herself had once borne.
He was sleeping, but it was a restless, fevered sleep which recalled to her mind the little Spanish abbé in La Force. It was the sleep of a man who is afraid and whose fear stalks even in his dreams… A fine, white hand came down and closed the window before Marianne's wide, horror-stricken eyes.
'Well?' Napoleon asked. 'It is indeed he, this time?'
She nodded, unable to speak, and was forced to lean back against the wall for a moment, overcome by the turmoil of her feelings, made up of a combination of an awful gladness and at the same time a kind of horror, mingled with surprise at seeing the devil who had so nearly destroyed her own life caught at last. When she had recovered herself a little, she looked up and saw the Emperor standing before her, watching her anxiously, while farther off Vidocq stood motionless against the central pillar.
'So,' she said at last, 'it is for him… the thing I saw below?'
'Yes. And I say to you again: I hate that instrument. I have seen it murder too many innocent people. I am appalled by it and yet that man does not deserve to die, like a soldier, before a firing squad. It is not to you, or even to Nicolas Mallerousse, that I am offering up his head, but to the shades of my own men, slaughtered piecemeal by this butcher.'
'When – when is it to be?'
'Now. See, here comes the priest.'
An old man in a black soutane had emerged from the shadows of the staircase. He held a breviary in his hand. Marianne shook her head:
'He will not want him. He is not a Catholic.'
'I know, but it was not possible to procure a Protestant minister. Besides, what does it matter in the moment of death whose are the lips that speak of God and of the hope of His mercy, so long as the words are spoken?'
The priest gave a little bow and then passed on to the closed door, the warder hurrying before him. Marianne gripped Napoleon's arm nervously:
'Sire!… Must we stay here? I—'
'You do not wish to see? I am not surprised. In any case, it was no part of my intention to oblige you to witness such a scene. I only wanted you to be quite sure that this time justice has not miscarried, and that nothing can halt its course now. Let us go down – unless you wish to bid him farewell.'
She shook her head and almost ran towards the stairs. No, she did not wish to see Francis Cranmere again. She would not triumph over him as he went to his death, if only for fear of seeing the last thoughts of the man she had once lov
ed, a man whose name she had borne, turn to hatred at the sight of her. If repentance were possible for such a man as Francis Cranmere, she would not have its blessed course turned aside for any action of hers.
She went down the stairs, the Emperor following, and across the plank bridge without a glance for the dreadful instrument below, and found herself before long in the great, white desert of the courtyard. The wind, buffeting her body, revived her and she turned her burning face to it. It had begun to snow again and a few flakes touched her lips. She put out her tongue and licked them gratefully and then turned and waited until Napoleon, less nimble than herself, caught up with her. He took her arm and they walked back, as they had come but more slowly now, to the Pavilion de la Reine.
'What of the others?' Marianne asked suddenly. 'Have you caught them as well?'
'Old Fanchon and her crew? You need have no fear. They are under lock and key and there is enough evidence against them to hang them a hundred times over, or send them to rot in prison for the remainder of their lives, without so much as mentioning this business. They will stand trial and pay the penalty in the ordinary way. For him, that was not possible. He knew too much and the English might even now have found a way to free him. Secrecy was vital.'
They were back in the empty room where Rustan was stirring up the fire. Napoleon sighed and removed his hat, from which the melting snow was running in thin streams.
'Now it is time to talk of you. When the roads are somewhat better, you will return to Italy. I must accede to your husband's requests because they are perfectly reasonable. It is not in the Emperor's power to withhold the Prince Sant'Anna's wife from him.'
Marianne and the Privateer Page 38