Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  ‘Rather fancy for the latter.’

  ‘Your King was wont to play at shepherds, was he not? So why should not poachers have their palaces? Oh, I forgot: they have.’

  The newcomer laughed, low and boisterous. ‘It ain’t so much of a holiday as all that.’ And he bent and slapped Arnim’s leg, jovial. ‘Eh, my shadow?’ Arnim restrained his flinch. The other looked around the pavilion, stepped to one of the window spaces, and took in a great breath of the night. He ran his hand up the smooth stone. ‘Neat enough: if our shadows are seen here, we will be thought two lovers and no more.’

  Arnim grunted. ‘A grand seduction indeed.’ He watched the figure in front of him, big and black against the moonlight. ‘Will you take a little wine, my dear sir? A pastry?’

  The figure turned. ‘I’ll take it all!’

  Arnim gave him time; watched him as he sat back against the stone, bottle in one hand and pie in the other, heaving them up into his mouth alternately. When the food was finished, the figure let out a great sigh.

  Arnim said, ‘You’re on a tightrope.’

  The man grunted. ‘And all Europe waiting for me to fall. Hah! And half of France too.’ The head turned. ‘You too. You’re waiting.’

  Arnim shook his head. ‘I’m a diplomatist, my dear sir. I dislike falls. Too much violence. Too much unpredictability.’ He leaned forward a fraction. ‘Think of me as the net, for when you fall.’

  A chuckle came out of the gloom. ‘I’ll remember that.’ His shadow broke suddenly, irregular and moving and now thrusting forwards. He had produced something from the recesses of his darkness, and Arnim took it. A box, the span of his hand in width, highly polished under his fingers. ‘A token for your master. An offering. That his restraint may endure. That the tightrope performance may continue.’

  Arnim enjoyed the texture of the wood in his hands a moment longer, then placed the box on the bench beside him. ‘The net will be here,’ he said.

  A grunt. ‘And that.’

  Silence. Arnim said, ‘It’s always an honour to meet, my dear sir; but there is a risk to it.’

  Another moment of silence. ‘And for you, old friend. And for you, eh?’

  ‘Know that I shall always match you, stake for stake.’ A pause. ‘Something worries you?’

  Now the shadow distorted again, and loomed forwards, and tapped Arnim’s knee. ‘And it should worry you too, you hear?’

  ‘Enlighten me, do.’

  ‘The royal correspondence.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘We never found it. Well, parts of it, of course. But not the real stuff. Not the diplomatic exchanges. Not the secret business.’

  Arnim’s voice was quieter, cold. ‘Not destroyed, then.’

  ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Mm, we’d all like that. But no, it’s out there somewhere.’

  ‘One means no disrespect to his divine Majesty, but is there no end to the idiocies?’

  ‘Someone’s got the dossiers – one of the entourage who hasn’t been picked up yet, perhaps; or perhaps they’re hidden somewhere.’

  ‘Mm. And you are looking, I presume?’

  ‘Yes. And if you’ve sense you’ll help.’ The shadow leaned forwards. ‘I assume there’s a few things in there to keep you awake. Your people ain’t as cold and clever as all that. Bound to – ’

  ‘You think it could be found? By someone other than you?’

  ‘Since I don’t know where it is, I have to assume that someone could fall over it at any time. And there’s a least one man looking for it. Fouché, Roland’s creature.’

  ‘I don’t – ’

  ‘Mark him. He’s a jackal, with energy and with brains.’

  ‘I have read the name, perhaps.’

  ‘He’s in everything. Busy-busy. Interests himself in the affair at the Garde-Meuble too.’

  ‘I take it you would not lament, should some accident befall him.’

  Just a chuckle in the gloom, and Arnim couldn’t be sure what it meant.

  ‘Meantime, we must hope he can be kept on less treacherous paths.’

  The other man grunted, and took a great swig of wine.

  Their handshake, when they left, was wary but then solemn. The other man said, ‘You wander Paris, alone, for Prussia. You truly do not fear, my friend?’

  Arnim gazed at him. ‘I consider outcomes. I calculate likelihoods. Thereby I recognize and tolerate the possibility of less desirable situations; nothing more melodramatic than that.’

  ‘Death would be rather undesirable.’

  ‘Death is not so hard, my dear sir. But regrettable when there is still so much life.’

  A chuckle, stretching into a kind of growl, and the man was gone into the darkness.

  Arnim stepped out of the pavilion, and as his foot touched earth he felt himself in a different place. The absorption of the interview, the world of the mind and the heart, vanished. He was back in revolutionary France, and its night was full of dangers.

  He touched the ring on his little finger; his control over his own destiny.

  Staring into the darkness, he began to see the patterns. In the same way, as he immersed himself in the silence he began to hear its infinite constituent noises, and to classify them. Leaves: leaves still clinging to branches swaying in the breeze; leaves on the ground swirling; and the shorter rasp of leaves moved by a boot. Creatures: birds – he’d had an uncle who could identify them by their call – and mammals. Mammals small and large; mammals careless of their own noise, and mammals trying to restrain it; mammals innocuous and mammals dangerous. He must distinguish the individual details of the French silence as he might the instruments in an orchestra. He must sense every element of the world, from a tempest to a breath.

  Particularly a breath.

  Fully five minutes after he had begun to watch and hear the night, Arnim was ready to move. A natural walk out of the pavilion – in case by chance he was observed – and around it. From the back of the pavilion, thirty paces through darkness, which must separate him completely from the place he had been. Then some three hundred paces on foot, first on a track known by particular trees and stones he had noted in the moonlight as he came, and then on a kept path which showed clear in the moonlight. Now he must abandon concealment, for nothing is more obvious than a man trying not to be seen.

  Something burbled in the darkness.

  Something of nature? Water – or animal?

  The burble again, from low to his left, and now it was more clearly a chuckle.

  Animal.

  A deeper growl joined it.

  The basest of the animals, indulging in the basest of its habits. He walked on.

  Immediately a man loomed at him from the path, a shadow to mirror his own and nearing him. They passed close. Hand tight on the blade in his pocket, Arnim murmured a courtesy.

  The courtesy was returned, and the shadows passed on through their element. Within two minutes he was on his horse, and within five the horse had carried him to where he’d left the carriage. As he came near the road he slowed the beast to a creep. Ahead, the outline of the carriage in the moonlight. And then a hand: the palm of a hand, projecting out of the trees just a yard or two ahead, an uncanny message that floated to him out of the night. He pulled the horse to a stop. He stroked its head slowly, willing it still, willing it easy.

  He stayed like that, bent over the neck as his eyes scanned what little he could see of the road through the trees, and still the hand floated in front of him.

  Suddenly from the road there was more noise in a moment than he’d heard in a quarter hour: running feet, a shout, a thumping and more shouting, and as Arnim fought to control his muscles, fought not to startle the horse with his tension, he heard a cry and something land heavy on the road. Running feet again, and then silence.

  Still the hand floated, a minute more, and then slowly it fell away into darkness. Arnim let the horse amble forwards again, and immediately Theodor was beside him and taking the reins and
leading the animal towards the carriage. ‘I guessed it for some road-robbery, Meister,’ he murmured; and Arnim nodded and dropped down from the horse. By the time he was settled into the carriage the horse had joined its companion between the shafts, and then they were rattling through the gloom towards Paris.

  Somewhere in the heart of France, Lucie and Kinnaird were swallowed by the forest. An hour after the trees had risen up around them, Kinnaird had forgotten that there had ever been a horizon. Life had become a narrower, darker thing. He was smaller, crowded and jostled by the trees he was trying to make his way through. He was hunted now, of course; a rodent hurrying through a burrow. In this world of undergrowth and darkness, a world of greens and shadows that flickered and shifted and shrank away and then loomed forwards, the idea of a Paris – a created place of people and buildings and noise – was not distant but impossible, to his shrunken fugitive mammal mind.

  After two hours, he no longer believed in daylight. The trees had become the columns and buttresses and arches of some ancient cathedral, gnarled and warped and ceaselessly moving around them, a place of pagan mystery and sacrifice where they had been entombed. Among its black eaves, lights flickered and then died, emblems of a lost ancestral sun.

  Or the muscles and fibres of some vast stomach, that seemed to roll and churn around them as they meandered.

  He had grown fanciful too, then. But his senses gave no sign that, when they had been taken into the tunnel of trees, they had not also been taken into the ground – not only into the darkness but downwards, drifting and spiralling. And slipping backwards, too, into an earlier age of the earth. Here the Lord had not finished His seven-day work. It was a world of half-formed things, with much yet uncreated.

  From the darkness, noises: there was running water somewhere nearby for half an hour or so, some river of eternity from the heart of the earth; there were hints of creatures – from above and around them cries and calls and chattering of birds and explosions of wings, from the undergrowth a restive rustling of something foraging; the mournful creaking of the trees as they moved and followed the two intruders; the constant watching and whispering of the leaves. And smells. It would never be dry in this place, and the air was thick with must and mould and damp soil, and sudden savoury bursts of herbs that had him turning his head to catch them before they drifted away.

  They were on two horses now, after a hasty purchase at an inn. In the madness, his one piece of good fortune had been that the police had come before he’d taken his purse from his coat, so they’d money enough for now. The shared horse had been uncomfortable and conspicuous, and he needed it not to tire. And as, gradually, Kinnaird had started to lose some of his alarm, he had become more aware of his ambiguous position on the animal, with a beautiful and vulnerable young woman against his chest and thighs.

  Lucie was riding slightly ahead of him. She was a wraith within the forest light, appearing and disappearing between the intermittent rays of the sun, some spirit of the trees, suggestive and deceptive.

  ‘You don’t talk,’ she said, head half-turning back towards him. ‘You don’t complain or anything.’

  ‘You’re disappointed? Surprised?’

  ‘Men talk.’ She was looking ahead again now. ‘Men complain.’

  ‘It seems that no Frenchwoman is ready to think me a true man.’

  ‘You’re not a normal man.’

  They rode on in silence.

  Three hours after their disappearance from the world, the landscape changed for a time. The dark sky of foliage thinned and, to Kinnaird’s awe, opened to reveal daylight. He gazed at it like a primitive seeing the eclipse. The ground was broken, erupting in massive rocks each the size of a house that loomed over the track and made the vegetation around them thinner.

  Kinnaird was gazing up at one of these, wondering at its age and feeling his smallness, and when his eyes dropped to the track again he was stunned almost to falling. A man had appeared around the next bend, walking towards them on the track, and it was as startling as the recreation of the sky had been.

  His surprise made him uncertain: was he supposed to react? Were they supposed to hide? Obviously not. But . . . he realized how comfortable he had become in their disappearance from humanity.

  As they came level, the walker dropped his head so that his face was hidden under the fringe of a hood; and his hand, Kinnaird saw, was held oddly poised at his hip as he walked – on the haft of a knife.

  On some instinct of propriety, Kinnaird turned his head slightly so that he did not seem to stare.

  The trees closed over them again.

  A mile later Kinnaird saw something moving in the trees. The coverage above was still heavy, daylight only intermittent, but the trees around them were more widely spaced and in a patch of dappled shadow, of greens and greys, he was sure he saw a figure. And then the phantom had disappeared into the patchwork of colours again.

  Moments later it happened again. This time it was distinctly a man, standing on a rise in the ground thirty paces off and watching them. His face was covered or shadowed, and a second later it had disappeared into the undergrowth.

  Then a face appeared among the shrubs at the side of the road, and Lucie’s horse shied and skittered, and after staring at them wide-eyed the face vanished.

  Kinnaird was looking for faces and figures now, so much that it took him longer to see a shelter hidden in the trees off to his right. A crude thing of branches and fronds and cloths, its colours and shapes blending with its surroundings. Then it was gone, but he was alert now and he started to see more of them. The same improvised lean-tos, and then one built of branches and cloths around the ruined walls of some ancient cottage. In several places there were cooking fires lit, smoke drifting up to merge with the shadows. There were more figures now. Those nearer the road would see the two riders, and some would stare and some would turn quickly away.

  Kinnaird edged his horse up level with Lucie’s. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘I think this is our destination.’

  ‘It – This?’ It was another world, populated by another species. Kinnaird had never felt so alien.

  ‘It is a place I have only heard of. A rumour.’

  He glanced at her face a moment longer, pale and set on the track ahead, restraining the urge to look at the faces that stared; he glanced and wondered again at her uncanny mix of fear and wisdom, at her strange relationship with the world.

  ‘Hold!’ A man on the track in front of them, and again Lucie’s horse skittered. The man had a sword in one hand and a pistol levelled at them.

  Lucie’s voice came low and flat. As usual, she found she was trying to make herself more passive, in the presence of a threat. ‘Who are – ’

  ‘You walk from here.’

  ‘What if – ’

  ‘You walk from here, or you turn and go back the way you came.’

  He looked lean, and capable.

  Kinnaird said, ‘You ask us to trust you, sir?’

  ‘I don’t give a damn. Walk, turn back, or die where you are. Your choice is no concern of mine.’

  Fouché hesitated in front of the royal palace of the Tuileries – felt his uncertainty, and pulled himself straighter.

  He reviewed the palace, as one more document placed in front of him.

  The Tuileries as symbol of monarchy; I as subject.

  The Tuileries as architecture: a hundred years in the building and rebuilding, from Catherine of the Medicis to Louis who called himself the Sun King, a grand statement of power in the grandest city in Europe by the grandest family. An endless wall of windows – hundreds? thousands? – running along the Seine and then filling his horizon now, gazing down on France. The monstrous central dome; dominance only. I as awe-struck peasant.

  The Tuileries as history, more than two centuries of it. Left behind by its kings when they preferred to create a court of fantasy at Versailles – far from the Parisians, hungry and angry. Until the Parisians forced the last of those kings
back to the heart of his capital, to a place with so many windows that the hunger and the anger could not be ignored. And when the National Assembly – that precociously, dangerously large gathering – needed a place for its deliberations the only hall big enough was in the King’s palace, so here they had come, to dictate terms to their captive landlord. From here the royal family had escaped; to here they had been dragged back. Now the royals had been imprisoned, and France was ruled from this place by the National Convention. I as insignificance. So much had happened here: the great drama of France.

  The Tuileries as stage . . . I as spectator.

  Or I as actor?

  Fouché looked around him: at the satisfying formality of the gardens, the ornamental trees sharp against the evening sky; at the palace of privilege abandoned by a discredited monarchy.

  I am entitled to be here now. I exercise influence here now.

  The Tuileries as disputed ground; I as rightful servant of the rightful regime. The Tuileries as battlefield; I as victor.

  No uncertainty now.

  But if this is a stage, what tragedy was played here and what comedy? What masquerade, what trickery might have been managed while eyes and ears were distracted with grander spectacle?

  Only two months ago, now.

  The 10th of August:

  Paris boils. Counter-revolutionary forces are getting close to the frontiers of France. The Prussian Duke of Brunswick has publicly threatened the destruction of Paris and her people if King Louis is harmed. The Assembly has summoned the National Guard from the provinces to defend the capital. They hang around the streets like the summer heat, pestering the women and pilfering under cover of revolutionary slogans. You can smell the fish on the troops from Normandy; the lads from Marseilles are singing their new song, upheaving Paris one tavern at a time. There are rumours of a Secret Committee of radical mayors and borough chiefs; the Secret Committee is hearing rumours of its own. For the first time someone has dared to say that the King is the threat to France. On the streets they’re demanding action. Paris has two governments – two Communes – each in emergency session, in adjoining rooms in the Town Hall and squabbling over the writing paper and trying not to look at each other on the stairs. The illegal Revolutionary Commune rules the dissolution of the legal one, but keeps three of its officials on; one of them is Danton. Impatient and mistrustful and angry, a feverish organism with artisans and armed shopkeepers running in its veins, the city of Paris is becoming the Revolution. But Louis has 4,000 men to defend him in the Tuileries; there’s surely no suggestion of a physical threat.