“Well, over dinner, Sir Pulteney alluded t’bein’ on intimate grounds with the Prince of Wales,” Lewrie told her. “And, he seemed t’be swimmin’ in gold guineas, ’tween his purchases at the tailor’s and him sportin’ all for dinner. Supper and the theatre’s his treat tonight, too. If they’re a pair o’ ‘sharps,’ then they’re both out a pretty penny, and if they think t’trick us out of ‘chink,’ then they’re barkin’ up the wrong tree. He seems genuine . . . annoyin’ly odd, but genuine.
“Should I write him a note and ask for a couple nights’ delay?” Lewrie offered, sure that something else had set her off, and he ran better-than-good odds that he was “in the quag, right to his eyeballs” over something.
“You will not!” Caroline snapped, after a long moment to mull it over. “If the Plumbs are as well connected and as wealthy and aristocratic as you say they appear, to turn them down would be unseemly. People on close terms with the Prince of Wales, perhaps even with the King himself . . .”
So are pretty whores, and Eudoxia Durschenko by now, Lewrie had to imagine, though he dared not say that aloud. The winter before, in London, the Prince of Wales—“Prinny” to his friends and “Florizel” to himself, God alone knew why!—had taken a keen interest in Eudoxia, and despite her evil-looking father’s Argus-eyed watchfulness over her virginity, the mort did sport a few more baubles than before!
“I’m in the same boat, Caroline,” Lewrie told her. “Boat, see?”
That was met with another roll of her eyes.
“I’d be wearin’ me own best, and my new’uns won’t be finished for days, so . . . ,” he went on. “Well, there’s new stocks and such, hats and gloves, but . . .”
“I suppose I could throw a suitable ensemble together at short notice,” Caroline allowed at last, with an exasperated, wifely sigh. “The Comédie Française? Gawd, it will all be in French!” she wailed, turning to sort through her new purchases to see if there was anything that would avail, instanter, to liven the best of her supper gowns.
Met an old friend o’ mine . . . in Paris? Lewrie tried to puzzle out as he began to change clothes. He couldn’t imagine who that would be, but . . . he had the uncomfortable feeling that he’d just dodged a broadside and that his wife, despite this new distraction, was still swabbing out, reloading, and just waiting ’til the range was shorter to fire off another!
Meanwhile, in the former offices of the Committee for General Security, just outside the eastern wall of the Tuileries, along the Quai Galerie du Louvre, Mlle. Charité de Guilleri was paying a call upon the head of the National Police, Joseph Fouché. It was not one that could be called a social visit, nor was it one done casually, for Fouché was a very clever, cold-blooded man; he had to be, to have survived from the earliest days of the Revolution, one of the last of the “old stagers” so steeped in the blood of discovered or denounced aristos, Royalists, and reactionaries. He’d created bloodbaths at Nevers and Lyon, had threaded a wary way through the denunciations and deaths of Marat, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the other Jacobins, and had prospered.
“Mademoiselle de Guilleri, ma chérie,” Fouché gravelled as she was at last let into his offices. He stayed seated, though, intent on the papers on his desk, scanning fresh denunciations of suspected plotters who still hoped to supplant the First Consul, undo the Revolution, and return royal rule to France. Joseph Fouché was an ill-featured man, rather short and stocky, some might say rotund due to his barrel chest. He cared little for fashion or the proper fit of his clothes, and still wore his shirt collars open, with a loose stock tied more like a sailor’s kerchief. He was also completely bald, and shaved what little stubble or fluff remained.
“What can I do for you, citoyenne?” Fouché asked, reverting to the form of address created more than a decade before at the start of the Revolution; unlike some newly risen arrivistes, Fouché was a dedicated common man of the Republic.
“The British captain I thought I shot, do you recall, citoyen?” Charité baldly began, knowing that coquetry and idle niceties before business were wasted on Fouché, and would irritate him further than she dared. She took a deep breath, waiting.
“Ouais?” Fouché said with a leery grunt, intent again upon his paperwork. He’d always been unimpressed and dubious of the little self-made heroine’s tale, thinking Charité a foolish dabbler, too full of herself, and too ready to push herself and her “cause” forward.
“I was mistaken,” Charité meekly declared. “The air-rifle . . . my shot was, perhaps, too weak to kill him, as I dearly wished. I met . . . I met his wife today, citoyen, here in Paris, and she spoke as if he is still alive, this very moment! He spied on us once, in New Orleans. Who is to say he is not here to spy on us again, you see?”
“You suspect he is here in Paris, to spy on us, citoyenne?” the policeman responded, setting aside a document and folding meaty hands atop his desk. He seemed amused, and a touch irritated, by Charité’s assertion. “Would it not make more sense for this fellow . . . what is his name?”
“Alain Lewrie, Citoyen Fouché,” Charité said, un-nerved by the man’s chary tone and expression. “An Anglais naval captain.”
Fouché made a pencilled note on a fresh sheet of paper, then looked up again with a scowl on his face. “Would it not make sense he . . . this Alain Lew . . . however you say it . . . spies in our seaports, our navy yards, than Paris, citoyenne? Perhaps you mis-heard what the Anglaise said. You’ve seen him yourself?”
“Non, citoyen . . . I have not seen him myself,” Charité rejoined, bristling a little to be patronised or dismissed. “But I speak very good Anglais, from dealings with the barbarous Américains in New Orleans, and I know perfectly what Madame Lewrie said. In anger, you see? Surprised by confrontation with another woman whom she suspects was once her husband’s mistress, n’est-ce pas?”
Charité de Guilleri explained the circumstances in “La Contessa” Phoebe Aretino’s parfumerie, how icy and angry Madame Lewrie had become upon her introduction . . . and how flustered Mlle. Aretino had become in turn at the mention of Alan Lewrie’s name!
“I quote, citoyen . . . ‘I will extend your regards to my husband, but do not expect them to be returned,’ ” Charité told him. “Lewrie is alive, Citoyen Fouché, and most likely travelling with his wife, here in Paris. I thought the presence of an Anglais officer who put aside his uniform to spy on us in Louisiana should be brought to your attention, lest he do so again against us.”
“These other people rescued by this Leew . . . whatever,” Fouché asked, scowling more deeply. “Do you remember their names?”
“Madame Lewrie alluded to many royalistes escaping Toulon on ‘her husband’s ship,’ she said, citoyen, though the only one she gave name to was a Vicomtesse Maubeuge . . . her former . . . ward, I believe Madame Lewrie said,” Charité easily recalled.
“Citoyenne Phoebe Aretino . . . hmm,” Eouché said with a grunt of displeasure. “Corsican, oui. Of noble birth? Non. A common putain in Toulon, as I recall. There is a dossier,” Fouché said with an idle wave of one hand. “An avid supporter of the Revolution in Toulon had no reason to flee. Service the invaders’ officers, for they were the only ones with money at the time, but . . . did Citoyenne Aretino deny any of the accusations?”
“No, citoyen,” Charité told him, shifting uncomfortably on her hard chair. She’d come to warn the authorities and to get vengeance on the bastard who’d slaughtered her kin and ruined her plans for revolt, but . . . Charité hadn’t planned on sending anyone else to prison—or the guillotine! “She seemed very upset by the confrontation, but . . . after, she . . . I asked her, not in so many words, n’est-ce pas? Mada— . . . Citoyenne Aretino seemed . . . wistful. La tristesse? A woman can see the look of a former lover who is still fond . . .”
“Womanly intuition,” Fouché sarcastically said with a sneer.
“In this instance, oui, citoyen, I am sure she was once Lewrie’s mistress, or lover,” Charité could firmly state. “Bu
t so many years ago, surely . . .”
“You have given me some things to look into, citoyenne,” Fouché told her, making more pencilled notes.
“I failed the Revolution, Citoyen Fouché,” Charité declared with a clever bit of frankness, and a becoming sniff into a handkerchief drawn from her left dress sleeve. “I truly did believe that I killed him with my shot. I am ashamed to confess my failure, one that puts you to extra work.”
Fouché tilted his shiny head to one side and peered at her for a long moment, unsure whether to laugh out loud at her pretensions as a patriot, and her theatricality. “I will look into this . . . Lewrie person’s presence in Paris, citoyenne,” he said at last. “I thank you for your honesty and your alacrity in bringing this matter before me. Perhaps it is nothing, yet . . . for the safety of the Republic, and the First Consul, enquiries must be made. Is that all, Citoyenne de Guilleri?”
“It is, citoyen Fouché, merci et au revoir,” Charité said with a sense of relief as she rose from her chair and escaped from the foul spider’s immediate grasp . . . though not his web, for it spanned all of France. In the heady early days, the French newspapers that reached New Orleans had limned Fouché in her pantheon of heroes with men such as Marat, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the other brilliant lions of the Jacobins, people she wished to emulate. It was only once she got to Paris and met some of those rare, surviving revolutionaries that Charité had had the scales torn from her eyes. Joseph Fouché was an ice-hearted executioner, plain and simple, and no coquetry, no beauty or grace, no flattery could make an impression upon him.
She would love it if Fouché found cause to arrest Lewrie as a spy, to hunt him down, fetch him into court in chains, and put his head on the block, ready to be shorn and tumbled into the basket at last.
Yet Charité already rued her coming to Fouché if Mlle. Phoebe Aretino was swept up as a reactionary, a secret royaliste traitor to the Revolution, perhaps even now in league with her former lover, the Anglais spy! Charité intellectually knew of the excesses of the Reign of Terror, of the slaughter in the surf with shot, bayonet, and sword as those refugees who had not found a ship tried to flee Toulon. Three thousand men, women, and children in the space of two hours, the rumour related! And twice that number perished under Gen. Dugommier’s guillotines over the next month after the city was re-taken.
But she had not been in Paris during those times, hadn’t seen, heard, or smelled the holocaust, which was now mostly a bad memory to the French, uneasily shrugged off as a temporary necessity. But for men like Fouché, it would never be over, so long as displaced aristos overseas, beyond his grasp, schemed and plotted to overthrow the Revolution and its new leaders. And there were those to aid them, in France!
“Mon Dieu, I have denounced an innocent!” Charité whispered to herself as she reached the clean air along the banks of the Seine, recalling how lovely and petite, how vivacious and charming Mlle. Aretino was, had been whenever she’d visited her shop. Would her glorious hair be shorn at the nape, would she die under the guillotine, for nothing?
Fouché rang a small bell on his desk to summon a clerk. There must be enquiries made about this Lewrie, even so. Laisser-passers were now required of all foreign visitors, and this Lewrie must have one, issued by the Foreign Ministry, registered at the city gates, and noted by the municipal authorities at the Hôtel de Ville. And every concierge at every hotel or lodging house, no matter how grand or how mean, might as well be in Fouché’s employ, and this would make locating the man and his wife very easy.
Fouché would send for information from the Ministry of Marine, as well, which kept dossiers on enemy Captains and Admirals, to see if they considered this Lewrie dangerous, beyond the scope of naval combat. He paused in his written demands, wondering if Citoyen Pouzin at the Foreign Ministry, a spymaster and aristo hunter well known to him, might have some information; he had been in the Mediterranean in the 1790s, when the de Guilleri chit said that this Lewrie had been.
“All these enquiries I wish answered by this time tomorrow,” Fouché demanded with an even fiercer scowl. “See to it, vite, vite.”
Oddly enough, at about that same time of late afternoon, Citoyen Philippe Pouzin (though no one was ever sure if that was the name he had been given at birth) was sharing a bottle of brandy with an old compatriot from his time in the Mediterranean, though with a certain well-hidden sense of distaste. Pouzin’s mission to subvert the Genoese, Savoyards, and Piedmontese in order to aid Gen. Bonaparte’s First Italian Campaign had been a smashing success, destroying their will to fight for the British, and buying their zeal to ally themselves with France. He and his underling spies, male and female, had even penetrated the elusive and ultra-secret Last Romans movement, which aspired to unite all Italy once more, and turn it into a world power which would re-take everything that had once been under the old Empire in the Balkans and Greece, in the Holy Land, Egypt, and North Africa. Not only penetrated the movement, but turned it to France’s advantage!
For that, Pouzin had been rewarded, promoted, and allowed to be among the living as the various feuding factions of the Directory slit each others’ throats and sent each other to the guillotine. He’d been overseas, like Napoleon, safe from the treacherous games. Now he held an elevated position in the spy organisation under the aegis of the Foreign Ministry, and had thickened on a rich, safe salary.
His unfortunate compatriot, however, had not been so succssful, and had, if appearances were reliable judges, fallen even further than anyone but the unfortunate Job could dread.
“The West Indies, Saint Domingue, and Guadeloupe were not my areas of concern, Capitaine Choundas,” said Pouzin in apology for not being cognisant of Choundas’s troubles. “The undermining of the Kingdom of Naples and the Two Sicilies, the retention of Malta, and the Adriatic took all my attention at the time of the Quasi-War with the Américains. You have my condolences for your, ah . . . lack of success.”
At least in the Med, Guillaume Choundas had still seemed vital, an active and hearty fellow despite his crippled leg with its rigid iron brace, the stiff black mask which covered his maimed face and dead eye. He’d had two arms the last time Pouzin had seen him, as well! Now Choundas was a grey-haired, creased, and stooping ruin, easily mistaken in his shabby remnants of naval uniform for a street beggar; as pruned and wrinkled and aged as a poor fisherman’s grand-père.
“You say this Lewrie, the author of all your misfortunes, is here in Paris, eh, Choundas?” Pouzin asked between sips of an excellent brandy.
“I saw him, Pouzin,” Choundas insisted in a harsh rasp. “Sure as I know you, did I see you on the street. He lodges in the Rue Honoré, he and his wife. Recall, citoyen, it was a close-run thing that I got the pay chests intended for the Austrians to your agents in Genoa, a hair’s breadth ahead of Lewrie’s pursuit, and would have made my escape to report to you, but for him. And what he did to our cause in the West Indies . . . ! All our vessels lost, our cargoes captured by the cursed, ungrateful Américains . . . led to them by that salaud. And my defeat and capture. We both know this peace is only a brief pause. The First Consul grows impatient and angry that the faithless Anglais delay the return of our former colonies, stall their evacuation of the island of Malta . . . which is in your area of expertise, n’est-ce pas?
“Trust me, Citoyen Pouzin,” Choundas gravelled, his remaining hand clawed about his glass and his one good eye glaring, “when war comes, that salaud Lewrie will be at our throats once more.”
“I gathered, though, Capitaine Choundas,” Pouzin replied, “that when we worked together in the Mediterranean, you were dismissive of his cleverness . . . that you put his interferences in your enterprises down to blind, dumb luck.”
Frankly, Pouzin had always been leery of Choundas’s excuses for his set-backs and losses, for they were based more on ancient Celtic Breton superstition than anything else. The man saw signs, portents, and omens in the flights of birds, like an ignorant peasant, despite his vaunted lev
el of education, imparted by cynical and worldly Jesuit tutors, of all people! Pouzin also knew that once Choundas was aware that this Lewrie was in the vicinity, he’d allowed his wits to be focussed more on the man’s destruction than upon the job at hand. Pouzin could plainly see why Choundas might wish revenge, having been so ravaged and made to match his old nickname of Le Hideux—The Hideous—by anyone, much less his bête noire, his imagined nemesis, Lewrie.
“You have spoken to people at the Ministry of Marine, mon cher Capitaine?” Pouzin asked him, feeling sympathetic enough to top up the poor ogre’s glass.
“Bah, those indolent and smug bourgeois new-comes! They arrive at nine, do no work ’til ten, then depart for déjeuner at twelve, not to return ’til three, and go see their wives and mistresses at five, the bear-skin slippered. . . !” Choundas almost howled with rage, choking on his beverage, and his bile. “They have no time for the likes of me these days, Pouzin, mon vieux. I upset their digestion.”
Choundas’s hideousness was certainly upsetting Pouzin’s senses, and the time he allowed the old fellow (wasn’t he younger than me, he thought?) was cutting into his supper, and time with his mistress.
“So long as he is here on innocent sight-seeing, mon chere, he is of no concern to my Ministry,” Pouzin had to tell him, if only to hasten his departure.
“Even though he and that foul Anglais spymaster, Zachariah Twigg, who fooled you when he play-acted the part of Silberberg, a Juif banker from London, have been joined at the hip for decades?” the old cripple accused. “Though I lacked proper support from well-placed spies in the West Indies, we did know that two of Twigg’s underlings were active, and that both of them, at one time or other, took passage with Lewrie . . . one to Saint Domingue to deal with that rebel general, Toussaint L’Ouverture. Lewrie and the Anglais secret service, Pouzin. Their lackey! Not clever, not all that intelligent, but . . . he does their bidding extremely well.”
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