The Lightstep

by John Dickinson

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Notes

  PART I: CROSSING July 1793 Chapter I Crossing

  PART II: THE SISTER May 1797 Chapter II A State of Germany

  Chapter III Fall of an Empire

  Chapter IV The Wounded Hand

  Chapter V Written in Grief

  PART III: THE FEARFUL CITY June–October 1797 Chapter VI The Gallant in Mourning

  Chapter VII The Count in the Coffee House

  Chapter VIII The Bridge and the Barge

  Chapter IX The Letter from Wetzlar

  Chapter X The Prince

  Chapter XI The Priest

  Chapter XII In the Barrack Room

  Chapter XIII Ways and Means

  Chapter XIV Vulture

  Chapter XV The Gathering

  Chapter XVI A Word

  Chapter XVII Alleys in the Mist

  PART IV: THE HOUSE OF THE GREEN JUDGE November 1797–January 1798 Chapter XVIII The Plundered Land

  Chapter XIX The Name

  Chapter XX The Breach

  Chapter XXI The Maimed Colossus

  Chapter XXII The Madman's Easel

  Chapter XXIII The Scent of Danger

  Chapter XXIV The Path from the Liberty Tree

  Chapter XXV The Lost Border

  Chapter XXVI The Reading Glass

  Chapter XXVII The Testimony of Papers

  PART V: THE DOORS OF HEAVEN January–March 1798 Chapter XXVIII Candlemas Ball

  Chapter XXIX The Painted Room

  Chapter XXX A Turning in the Road

  Chapter XXXI Confession

  Chapter XXXII The Last Dance

  Chapter XXXIII Third Night

  Chapter XXXIV The East Wall

  Chapter XXXV The Grate

  Chapter XXXVI Before the Doors

  Cast List

  Acknowledgements

  The Lightstep

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  The Lightstep

  John Dickinson

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  ISBN 9781407042978

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  First published in Great Britain

  in 2008 by David Fickling Books

  a division of The Random House Group Ltd

  Copyright © John Dickinson 2008

  John Dickinson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact,

  any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 9781407042978

  Version 1.0

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  To Pippa

  Notes

  Three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the new republic of France declared war on the old regimes of Europe. Chief among these was the Holy Roman Empire, a loose confederation of mainly German princedoms and bishoprics under the leadership of the Austrian Hapsburgs.

  The French revolutionaries hoped that the peoples of Europe would rise against their rulers. However, only a few small uprisings occurred, in Belgium and in Germany. The men who led these efforts may have been inspired by the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality, but fate was cruel to them. Their causes did not prosper.

  In the summer of 1793 a French army was occupying the German city of Mainz, with the support of some of its citizens. Austrian, Prussian and other German forces had arrived to retake the city. The siege lasted for months.

  PART I:

  CROSSING

  July 1793

  I

  Crossing

  A young man saw his dreams broken. He saw that he had helped to betray them. That was why he came to hate.

  That was why Michel Wéry, once a petty gentleman of Brabant, was in Mainz in the spring and summer of 1793. It was why, on a dimming July evening, he followed a guide from his cellar shelter on the first stage of a long journey.

  He was a tall man. His brow was high, rounding backwards into the soft browns of his hair. Hunger had hollowed his face and pinched his neck. His skin had lost its natural tan. It was blotched and bad after the months spent penned in the city. His whiskers straggled over his cheeks and throat. His eyes were sunk, and the skin in the pits was brown, as if it had been stained. The downward jut of his nose lent him a hawkish look, as he glanced to left and right for signs of danger.

  Beneath his greatcoat he was naked to the waist.

  He had emerged in the shadow of a ruined church. The church had once been beautiful, with tall windows and a steep-pitched roof reaching up three-quarters of the height of its octagonal tower. On the tower there had been a clock-face with gilded hands, and an onion-dome like the cap of a priest. But the roof was fallen, the clock stopped, the dome gone altogether. The stones were streaked with great tongues of soot and the timbers were charred by fire. Wéry did not look up.

  A sound swelled in the air, passing overhead – the liquid hum of a cannon-ball, followed by the crash. (And where did that one fall? The cathedral again? The house of some citizen?) Here came another. Wéry did not duck. Ducking did no good.

  The street was empty and scattered with rubble. It was scattered too, with a thick layer of earth and dung, laid by once proud citizens to damp the impact of mortars and solid shot firing into the town. The dung was everywhere, moist and dark after the recent wet weather. It coloured the cobbles and the lowest few inches of the house walls with its foul brown stains.

  Everything must stink. Wéry knew that he too must stink, but he had lost the sense of it long ago.

  The guide caught his arm. The two men hurried down the street and across the Square of Our Lady. To their left rose the huge, six-towered, red-stone cathedral. Part of the great roof had collapsed. The east towers stood like broken teeth, wrecked by fire. In the porches were carved the figures of fiends, blank eyed and grinning. Wéry did not see them as he passed. The fiends went on grinning after he had gone.

  The houses were half-timbered, with elaborate diagonal patterns of black and white. They were tall, under steep roofs, and their upper storeys leaned out over the streets. But the doors were fast and the windows shuttered. Few if any people were inside them. The inhabitants were crammed into cellars and crypts across the town, sheltering from the bombardment. The streets were empty. Even the population of stray cats had vanished, because the people were hungry no
w, and in the lulls they would come out to hunt anything they could eat. They would hunt for food, and for firewood, and the ragged republican militiamen would beat up and down the streets and scream at them to observe the curfew. But they would come out all the same. They were weak and desperate. When the sickness came, it would kill them in hundreds.

  At the end of the street a row of houses had been gutted by fire. The house fronts leaned dangerously outwards. The roofs were gone and the windows were as empty as the eyes of skeletons. And another ball smashed uselessly into tiles somewhere close by.

  Not long ago the defenders had sneered at the shot, when they saw how few killed anyone. They had been brave, and laughed. But bravery starved. Courage was wearing away. They did not sneer now. And in the darkness, sometimes they wept. Rumour said that the French garrison was negotiating its surrender. The French would abandon their allies, the Mainz republicans. The republicans could not hold the city alone. They would have no escape from the revenge of the besiegers, and of their own townspeople.

  Order was breaking down. Commands were not obeyed any more. Tasks that should have been done were not done. Down by the waterfront, under the walls of the baroque palace, a corpse lay unburied. It was a republican militiaman, shot by firing squad. The dead man's arms lay flung wide, like a victim of crucifixion. Someone had taken his musket and coat and boots, but then they had left him here, in a pool of his own blood.

  Beside the body Wéry and his guide crouched and waited. The guide was scanning the waterfront fortifications. There were not many defenders here, because the Rhine protected this side of the city from assault, and because the fortifications themselves were dreadfully exposed to enemy cannon fire from across the river. All the same, the two men did not want to be seen, or stopped or questioned.

  As his guide peered around the corner of the palace building, Wéry gathered his breath. His eyes rested on the corpse beside him.

  The face, twisted with shock and pain, was familiar, but he could not remember the man's name. The cheeks were hollow, the eyes rolled their whites at the sky. The mouth was open in a silent howl. The teeth were bad and bloody, and many of them were missing. The shirt was lifted halfway up his chest, showing how tightly the skin had drawn over the ribs, and how it swelled over the pot-belly. Hunger did that. It had done the same to Wéry. But this man would not be hungry any more.

  Something was moving around the dead man – something crawling or trembling on the dung-scattered cobbles at his shoulder. Yes, lice: a small tide of lice, creeping out from the filthy collar, leaving the body as it cooled, looking for some other way to live now that their host was dead. Wéry had seen that before. The man must have died in the last hour. He must have been shot by the very men to whom he was going. Did anyone remember why?

  Lice were everywhere, like the dung. Wéry had them too.

  'Come on!'

  The two men scuttled into the open space between the palace and the low river wall. The wall was littered with rubble and wrecked guns. The few serviceable cannon were silent and unattended for want of powder. Here the two men were most at risk from enemy shot. But now, after the close, hellish world of the city streets, they could see.

  It was sunset. The air moved, cool and steady on the skin. To their left the palace was a shadow – a mass of black shapes of roofs and gables, battlements and the cupola of the corner tower, all outlined in living gold. To their right, across the grey flow of the Rhine, the thick light yellowed on the hills. Smoke gathered around the complex of earthworks at the bridgehead on the east bank, which was still held by the French garrison. Beyond, out on the slopes, more smoke-plumes trailed across the land. Peeping among them were the brown lines of the nearest trenches and batteries aiming inwards at the city. As they hurried along the waterfront Wéry saw the low bank of smoke grow suddenly, in a thick, silent puff. He heard the ball drone by, and the distant thump of the gun. That was the Prussians firing. The Prussians always seemed to have ammunition.

  Ahead of them, beyond the corner of the palace and the bastion at its feet, the Rhine bent westward. It curled through three long river-islands that lay like dead whales in the flow. On the far bank the attacker's lines curled to follow it: first the Saxons, Wéry knew, then the Franconian contingent, and then the Prussians again, camped at both ends of the bridge of boats that linked their positions on the far bank with the main besieging force, dug in around the town on this side of the river.

  Breathless, the two men reached the bastion at the foot of the squat little corner tower of the palace. They threw themselves down in the shelter of the low wall.

  There were men in the bastion. They were a handful of the Mainz republican militia, posted here because it was not one of the immediate points of danger which the French felt they must guard for themselves. They were a ragged and filthy crew, ill-armed, with a mix of cross-belts and military-style coats over the remains of civilian clothes. There were patches on their elbows, long whiskers on their cheeks, and their feet were bare or tied with rags.

  Their commander was another young man, once a student at the Mainz university. He was short, hatless, with wild dark hair and heavy brows. He crouched at the parapet, looking somberly over the rubbled lip of the wall at the batteries on the far bank. It was he who had ordered the killing of the man by the palace, half an hour before. If that weighed upon him yet, no one could tell.

  'Jürich,' called one of his followers hoarsely. 'Hey, Jürich!'

  The bastion commander looked around.

  'The Belgian's here.'

  Another ball moaned inwards. Somewhere nearby a fire must have started, because there was smoke in the air.

  The commander beckoned. Wéry crawled over to him.

  'Look downstream,' said the commander.

  Wéry lifted his head above the battlement.

  'The islands are held by the French, still,' muttered the bastion commander. 'They will be watching out. They'll watch harder as the dusk falls. The main flow of the river is this side of them. You must stay this side, too. Stay with the current until you pass the last of them. Then you must strike for the far shore. Save your strength for that. If you leave it too late you'll be swept down to the bridge, and the Prussians will shoot you in the water. Understand?'

  Wéry peered down at the islands, now fading into the dusk. There seemed to be very little space between the tail of the last French-held island and the Prussian bridge. Very little, for a half-starved man who must swim that great current at night.

  'I understand,' he said simply.

  'Now. Follow the line of the bridge inland on the far side. There. That encampment. Look – you can see the fires, now. That's what you are making for. They're troops of the Franconian Circle – mostly from the Erzberg bishopric. See it?'

  'Yes.'

  'You must surrender as soon as you have a chance – to the Franconians if at all possible. Ask for the Erzberg contingent, and then for an officer called Adelsheim. If you find him, you use my name. Understand?'

  Wéry was still trying to measure the distance he would have to swim, and weighing the chances of reaching the far bank before he was swept down to the bridge.

  'This officer,' he said at last. 'This Adelsheim. How do you know him?'

  The bastion commander grimaced. 'My cousin was his governess. She taught him French. She still lives in their house.'

  Wéry shrugged at the human ties that had been ruptured by war. 'Will he get me to the Imperial Headquarters?'

  'No. His superiors will have to do that. But you must ask for him first, for your own safety.'

  Wéry's eyes brooded on the river – the great, grey river, cold and heavy, that drowned men every year. Darkness cloaked the far bank, where soldiers patrolled with muskets and would shoot at any sight or sound. As he watched, one of the batteries on the far bank loosed all its guns together, and a pale light flickered in the clouds of smoke.

  Drone, drone, drone and thump-thump. And crash.

  Crash, thought
Wéry absently. The sound of another dream breaking.

  The two men shared so many things. Both were radicals, who had taken arms to overturn the old, privileged order in their homelands. Both had looked to the new republic of France for help. They had heard and believed the calls of a common freedom sounding from Paris. But Wéry had seen his new state of Belgium betrayed and abandoned. And now France was about to betray the republic of Mainz, too. In the struggle of the great powers there was no room for the little causes any more. There was only a lethal, dwindling game to be played and played until it was lost. No power was truly a friend.

  'I've been saying goodbye to your uncle,'Wéry murmured.

  The man Jürich glanced sharply at him. His uncle was no sympathizer with the city republic. He had come to Mainz to extract his nephew before war closed the city gates, and had been trapped there by the siege. 'And?'

  'Small comfort. He understands that you are trying to open negotiations with the Empire. But he thinks it is too late. He says the Imperial commanders won't listen to you. He says they don't have to. They'll deal with the French. The French will leave, and the Empire will come in and pick up the pieces. Why promise anything to men who rebelled against their own prince?'

  The bastion commander looked at him somberly 'And what do you think?'

  Wéry grinned. 'I agree, of course. But I'll still go for you.' He added softly, 'My rule now is to decide first what Paris would want me to do. Then I do the opposite. And those fellows over there are less likely to shoot me than they are you. My crime against them was a while ago.'

  The bastion commander nodded. He gestured to his followers. 'The rope.'

  The rope was fastened to the carriage of a wrecked gun. Over the parapet it went, long and dark and snaking in the dusk. There was a faint splash as it touched the water. Wéry took it just below the knot and tugged hard, flinging his weight backwards. The dead gun did not move.