Father, I will close now. Please forward my love and devotion to Mother and Ned; as I say, I hope to see you all once more, if you will have me, on my return to England; at which date I will be able to thank you, Father, for the reparations you have made to the young lady whose honor I so carelessly mistreated with the actions of my youth.
May God keep you, Sir.
I Remain, with Love,
Your Devoted Son
HEDLEY VICARS
1
AT THE NEW GREAT EXHIBITION
It was at the opening of the New Great Exhibition, on the 18th of July 1870, that I first encountered the famous engineer Josiah Traveller in person, although I had grown up with my brother Hedley’s tales of the devilism wrought by Traveller’s anti-ice in the Crimean campaign. Our first meeting was brief enough and quite overshadowed in my mind by the wonders of the Crystal Cathedral and all it contained—not to mention the beautiful face of one Françoise Michelet—and yet the chain of events initiated by that first casual encounter were to lead link by link into the astonishing adventure which would lift me above the very stratosphere; and plunge me at last into the depths of a man-made hell at Orléans.
In that climactic year of 1870 I was a junior attaché to the Foreign Office. My father, despairing of my shallow character and shallower intellect, had been eager to find me a role in which I would be of significant service to the country. I believe he had toyed with the idea of purchasing a commission for me in one or other of the Services; but, blighted as he was by Hedley’s Crimean experiences, he had decided against that course. Also I have always shown a certain facility with languages, and Father vaguely imagined that might be useful in overseas postings. (He was wrong, of course; English remains the common tongue of the civilized world.)
And so a diplomat I became.
You must picture me, then, at the age of twenty-three, somewhere beneath the bottom rung of the great Ladder of Diplomacy. I was five feet ten inches in height, of slender build, fair-haired and clean-shaven—of acceptable appearance, if I may say so, if not noticeably overbright. I was not long down from college but already rather bored by my work, which largely consisted of desk-bound paper-shuffling in a congested office deep in the bowels of Whitehall. (I had been looking forward to a posting to the capital, Manchester, but I soon learned that London had remained the administrative hub of the Empire, despite its reduced national status.) How I anticipated my first overseas posting! As I stared sightlessly at my blotter I strolled before the bejeweled palaces of the Raj princes; I confronted the wild Indians of Canada armed with nothing but Treasury tags and crocodile clips; and my teacup was a schooner in which I sailed in the wake of Cook into the dusky arms of South Pacific maidens.
With all that to do each day I didn’t complete a great deal of work; and Mr. Spiers, my superior, soon began to show dangerously high steam levels.
Therefore I was more than happy when my facility with languages won me an assignment to attend the opening of the New Great Exhibition.
Spiers stood over my ink-stained desk, his gin-blown cheeks aquiver and his sad little walrus moustache working over his mouth. “You’re to be attached to the Prussian party,” he said. “Old Bismarck himself will attend, I’m told.”
I could sense an envious stirring among the fellows at their desks. To rub shoulders with Prince Otto von Schцnhausen Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Prussia—who not four years earlier had given the armies of old Franz Joseph of Austria a damn good licking in under two months… Said Spiers, “The Prussians will be traveling by Light Rail to the Belgian ports, and then by fast packet to Dover. You’ll be in the party to meet them when they land.”
“Sir, why such a circuitous route? The Light Rail from Calais is much faster—”
He eyed me bleakly. “Vicars, every time I think I’ve underestimated you, you come through again. Because of the situation between Prussia and France, boy. Don’t you read the newspapers? For God’s sake don’t talk to Bismarck or you’ll start another blessed war…” And so on.
In any event, I packed up my desk with a light heart and set off for Dover. The Prussian delegation traveled from that port by Light Rail to London; the Rail company had provided a carriage especially decorated with the arms of the Prussian King William, and the Prussian eagle flew on pennants at each corner. A fine sight we must have made as we soared along our single rail at fifty miles per hour a hundred feet above the rolling Kent countryside!
The party dined in the Imperial Embassy off St. James’s Square, and a grand affair it was too. The dozen Prussians in their grand uniforms, their chests ablaze with medals, looked like a row of aging peacocks. I in my new cummerbund, the most junior of our party and utterly unbemedalled, felt tongue-tied; but once the wine and other liqueurs worked their spell my spirit seemed to expand to fill the airy, ornate spaces of His Excellency’s dining room. I toyed with silver cutlery and savored the aroma of a brandy that had been casked before Napoleon was a boy, and my world of ink-stained desks seemed as far away as the Little Moon. At last, I fancied, I knew why I had joined the diplomatic service.
As the evening wore on Bismarck himself took rather a liking to me. Otto von Bismarck was a rotund, rather grandfatherly gentleman; and to him I was “Herr Vicars, my polite host.” I smiled glassily and sought topics of conversation. Bismarck ate heartily but would drink only a foul- smelling Germanic beer from a great lidded tankard; I fancied that he strained the worst elements of the brew through his impressive moustache. The beer, Bismarck whispered to me in his halting English, helped him to forget the complexities of his life at the court of King William, and to fall into sleep each night.
On the morning of the eighteenth we rose early. The Little Moon was still visible in the dawn sky, a fist of light tracking steadily toward the horizon. We caught the Light out of Euston for Manchester Piccadilly, and thence made our way by hansom to Peel Park, at the north of the city. By noon we had joined the procession of dignitaries approaching the vast gates of the Crystal Cathedral which had been erected in the Park. Even Bismarck, Colossus of Europe, became just another face in the crowd; and I was amused—and impressed—to see the Prussian’s round jaw grow slack as we neared this newest symbol of British ingenuity.
Like the first Crystal Palace—which had been erected in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851—the Cathedral was a monument of iron and glass designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. Laid out in Gothic cruciform style, its walls towered above us with the July sunlight blazing from a thousand panes. A Light Rail link soared from the east on graceful pylons and entered the building through an arched portal perhaps a hundred feet above the ground. Over the Cathedral’s entrance stood a spire five hundred feet tall; its distant tip, sporting a bravely fluttering Union flag, seemed to scrape the light clouds.
I barely heard my colleagues’ steady murmur of explanations to the awestruck Prussian delegation: “With over fifty acres of glass—twice as much as the Crystal Palace of ’51—and with a hundred thousand companies exhibiting (double the number of Paris in 1867) this fair will truly be an Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations; as well as a fitting celebration of Manchester’s new status: Manchester and the North of England, workshop and capital of Britain and the Empire… the organizers anticipate ten million visitors in all—a hundred thousand this first day alone…”
We entered the building. I stood in that vast, hushed space; the clear glass roof seemed so high that clouds might form beneath it, and the iron frame of Sir Joseph’s construction seemed fairy-light, surely incapable of bearing such a weight of glass. The overall impression was something of that of a great glasshouse—but with none of the heat of the glasshouse; in fact the air inside the building was pleasantly cool, thanks to twenty great fans set high in the walls and powered, I was given to understand, by anti-ice steam turbines.
The babble of excited voices that carpeted the building seemed confined to the few feet of atmosphere just above my head, as if the vast volum
e of air reduced human activities to insignificance. The Light Rail link swept across that great space without visible means of support, terminating in a small platform built into the inside of the wall; a Mechanical Staircase carried passengers from the platform to the ground.
A high dais had been set up at the far end of the building; already it bore an array of grand-looking gentlemen in frock coats and toppers—not to mention a full orchestra and a thousand choristers. Kings, Chancellors and Presidents formed into rows meekly before the dais. I led my party of Prussians to positions delineated by red ropes borne on brass poles. I stood in my place patiently, gloved hands folded before me; and, looking down, I was astonished to observe that the Cathedral’s entire floor area had been carpeted with a thick red weave.
“It is indeed an expensive occasion.”
I looked to my left, startled—and found myself gazing into a pair of female eyes, ice-blue and sharply humorous, set in a china face.
I essayed a stammered reply.
“Excuse me,” she said tolerantly. “I caught you peeking at the acreage of carpet. I, too, was impressed.” She smiled at me—and it was as if the sun had come out. My new conversant was perhaps twenty-five; she wore a small-bustled, elegant dress of a pale blue velvet which offset her eyes perfectly; her night-dark hair was restrained into a simple bun, although curls straggled endearingly about her fringe. About her neck she wore a choker of black velvet, and that neck, a sculpture in pale flesh, led my eyes smoothly down to creamy pools of skin—
And I, prize chump, was staring unforgivably. I was vaguely aware of a young man beyond her, a swarthy, slim specimen who watched me suspiciously. “Forgive me,” I stammered at last. “My name is Vicars; Ned Vicars.”
She proffered a small gloved hand; I held it gently. “I am Françoise Michelet.”
“Ah—” Her accent was faint but unmistakable; “peeking” had sounded like “picking,” with the soft intonation of the southern Gallic provinces, perhaps of Marseilles. “You are French, mam’selle.”
“You should be in your Foreign Office,” she said drily.
“I am,” I replied like a fool—and then grinned at myself as I worked out her joke. “I am on duty here, I fear.”
“There are duties more onerous, I am sure.”
“And you?”
“Strictly pleasure,” she said, her voice light and a little bored. “This is one of the highlights of the season; and soon I shall be winging my way to Belgium for the launch of the Prince Albert. You British certainly throw good parties these days.”
“And if all the guests are as charming as you, I am sure the trouble is worth while.”
She raised her eyebrows at this clumsy gallantry. “Will you attend the Albert launch, Mr. Vicars?”
I frowned. “I fear my assignment with Herr Bismarck’s party will keep me occupied until after the launch. But,” I went on hurriedly, “perhaps we—”
But there was no possibility of further discussion with this intriguing stranger; for, to a peal of choral voices which dazzled from the glass walls, the royal procession was proceeding grandly up a shallow flight of stairs to the dais. His Imperial Majesty himself was a neat figure in black, almost lost amid scarlet and silver uniforms. A little behind Edward marched Gladstone, the Prime Minister, his gray suit a splash of drabness in the military glitter.
The choir fell silent, last echoes rattling around the panes like trapped birds. Then the Archbishop of Canterbury stepped forward, miter and all, and called us, in sonorous tones, to prayer.
A reverent hush descended on the grand multitude.
Then Edward himself stood up. I was far away in that vast field of a building, but I could see how he adjusted his pince-nez and referred to a small notebook. His voice was low, yet it seemed to fill the great glass hall.
His words plain and unaffected, he recalled the first Exhibition of 1851 which, like the present one, had been intended to “wed high art with the greatest mechanical skills;” that earlier fair had been inspired by Edward’s father, the Prince Consort Albert, since lost to the typhoid; and Edward remarked how proud Albert would have been to see the events of today.
As the King spoke I was assailed by a sense of dislocation. Heads of state like Bismarck and Grant stood respectfully, here at the heart of the most powerful Empire the world had ever known: an Empire whose ships owned the seas, and whose anti-ice mechanical marvels girdled the globe.
And yet here was nothing more than a thin, rather shallow-looking young chap, quietly speaking of his lost father.
His Majesty concluded and retired, and the choir ripped into the Hallelujah Chorus.
Françoise leaned close to me and murmured through the music, “Rather a subdued performance from your new King.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The stories are that young Edward, with his circle of well-to-do friends like Lipton, is something of a—what is the word? a sybarite? Such a shallow hedonist matches well the type of men of power in your country today—I mean the industrialists—as his mother never could.”
A little stiffly I replied, “Victoria abdicated after the loss of her husband, and the sudden retirement of Disraeli two years ago. And as for Edward—”
But her moist lips had formed into a delicious—but mocking—moue. “Oh, have I offended you?… Well, I apologize. But Edward is right about one thing: that Albert would have been proud to see this. And even more proud to see the behavior of the craven politicians of your Parliament.”
Her perfume filled my head, and I struggled to retain my powers of speech. “What do you mean, mam’selle?”
She brushed her glove through the air. “Françoise, please. Your parliamentarians opposed Albert’s first Exhibition; and yet when they saw how well it achieved its principal aim they have fallen over each other to endorse subsequent events.” She looked at me quizzically, and two small wrinkles appeared above her button nose. “You do understand the purpose of such fairs, do you not, Mr. Vicars?”
“As His Majesty said, a celebration of—”
Again the glove waved, a little more impatiently. “To promote trade, Mr. Vicars. Your Crystal Cathedral is a vast shop window for your wonderful British goods.”
As I trawled my dim brain for a means of continuing the conversation, Françoise’s companion touched her arm. “We must not detain your new friend, my dear.” His accent was clumsy, and he fixed me with a fish-like stare. “I am sure he has duties.”
We introduced ourselves formally—he turned out to be one Frédéric Bourne, an aristocratic young Frenchman of no discernible occupation—and we shook hands even more stiffly.
Françoise watched this with a clinical amusement.
The music was done; the stewards dismantled the rope barriers, and the rows of dignitaries broke ranks. I turned to Françoise once more. “I have been pleased to meet you.”
“And I you,” she said rapidly in French. “At least, I was pleased to find that you were not one of that party of German pigs.”
These words shocked me. “Mam’selle,” I protested in her language, “you hold powerful views.”
“Does that surprise you?” She raised a perfect eyebrow. “You are a diplomat, sir; surely you understand the significance of the Ems telegram?”
This document was indeed the talk of Europe at that time. A dispute between France and Prussia had flared over King William’s proposal of his relative, Prince Leopold Hohenzollern, as candidate for the throne of Spain (which had been vacated by the scandalously promiscuous Queen Isabella). France, of course, had protested strongly; but representations made directly to William by the French ambassador had fallen on deaf ears. Now these representations had been portrayed insultingly by the Prussians in the famous Ems telegram.
“The document,” said the girl, “is an affront to France.”
I smiled, I hoped indulgently. “My dear mam’selle, such antique issues as the Spanish succession are scarcely of significance in the modern world.” I waved my h
and at the marvels all around us. “And this, mam’selle, is the modern world!”
She frowned. “Really. Pray do not patronize me, sir. It is obvious to all but the most naпve—” I reddened “—that the Spanish candidature is indeed of little intrinsic interest, but it is the issue which the devious Bismarck is exploiting in order to provoke a war with France.”
I leaned toward her and quietly expressed the view of the British diplomatic corps. “To be honest, mam’selle, the Prussians are a bit of a joke, for all their posturing.” I ticked points on my fingers. “First, France possesses the finest army in Europe. Second, we live in an era of Rationality. There is a Balance of Power which has endured since the Congress of Vienna, which followed Bonaparte’s fall more than fifty years ago; and—”
She silenced me with a wave. “Bismarck is an opportunist. He cares nothing for your Balance; his motivation is his own ambition.”
I shook my head. “But how would a war with France serve him?”
“You must ask him that, Mr. Vicars. As for France, you are surely aware that we have already mobilized.”
I felt my mouth drop open, like some fish’s. “But—”
But the swarthy Bourne was touching her sleeve once more, and she terminated our conversation gracefully. I steadily cursed myself. To have allowed my conversation with this vision to meander into the obscurities of the Hohenzollern candidature! What had I been thinking of?
I called after her, “Perhaps I will see you later in the day…?”
But she was gone in the dissolving throng.
* * *
Exhibits were laid out around the Cathedral floor—and the balcony which circled the walls—under massive signs identifying their countries of origin. These signs were constructed from tubes glowing with electric light. Bismarck and his entourage toured the displays with patience and humor. They were particularly drawn by the stand from the United States of America. Among the Colt revolvers, tubs of chewing tobacco and other expressions of the American character, there was a reaping machine provided by the McCormick company; its steam stack and boiler looked large enough for a battleship, and the Prussians gathered in an awed group beneath six-feet-tall cutting blades.
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