Roland, on the royal servant: old Bonfils, that’s the man. The steward’s steward. Behind the titles and the rituals, the man who made the royal household function. Rather a curious little fellow, if one noticed him at all. But one didn’t, really. Invisible, yet saw everything.
Fouché liked the idea of Xavier Bonfils.
Isolation had left Pieter Marinus feeling futile. He could rouse little enthusiasm for what little business was to be had. France seemed a greyer, duller place now. The prices were rising in the markets, and faces were meaner, and more vicious. People of quality and of life were shutting themselves up indoors. If they ventured out, the men of culture and discretion with whom he might once have enjoyed a little conversation, they did so cloaked and hasty.
Only the angry boisterous men walk comfortably.
The rue Allent was a little oasis in the brutal world: a street of quietness and proportion, as he walked in it this pleasant evening; the houses elegant and even; not a street of the rich, but a street of quality. And No 17 was the house of Docteur de la Musique Noyons, as well it might be, with its curtains all tied regularly, with the paintwork of its windows fresh, with the step well scrubbed; and Monsieur le Docteur Noyons had a manuscript attributed to the hand of Lully himself, with which he was loth to part, but if he could find a gentleman of discernment to whom to sell it, he would be reassured that necessity had not forced him into irresponsibility.
A last blossom of delicacy in this new harsh season.
Marinus knocked.
And waited. He knocked again, a little firmer. The door, unlocked, gave a fraction.
He hesitated, called a timid ‘Hallo?’, and pushed. The door swung open. He stepped in, with another polite hallo.
The hall was as elegant as the exterior and his imagination had promised. Chequerboard tiles and subdued quality.
‘Bolt the door, and kindly come into the kitchen.’ The voice was muffled. He did as bid, and followed the passage towards the back of the house. Just before the final door he glimpsed movement beside him, realized it was his own in a mirror, and in that second also saw a figure through the half-closed door who would have been able to see him in the mirror. He had already pushed at the door, and it was swinging open and his unease was growing with the opening and he took a breath and forced himself to stand his ground, and at last he could see the figure full, and he gasped.
It was Karl Arnim.
Their greeting was courteous, warm.
‘But – how? and how can – ?’ Marinus stopped himself. ‘Forgive me. Obvious and trivial questions.’
‘Not at all. Most understandable. You must please excuse the deception. Rather childish, but it seemed imprudent to use either of our houses. Now, as you are not the authorities I need no longer skulk by the back door. There is a bottle of wine and some fruit in the parlour, and I do not propose to pass a moment longer than necessary in this servant’s squalor.’
The peaches were fresh, and the wine excellent. ‘And Doctor Noyons? He is a friend – an ally?’
‘Doctor who? I never heard of him.’
‘The owner of this house.’
‘I have no notion who he is. The name was contrived to fit the story. The address was convenient. I knocked this afternoon and used the power of revolutionary authority, the threat of unearthly terrors, and a couple of coins to induce the owner to vacate his establishment for an hour.’
‘But why?’
Arnim looked up from his glass, amusement. ‘May not a man enjoy a bottle of wine with an acquaintance, even in these hard times?’
‘Triviality does not become you, Arnim.’
‘Very well. I confess I am obliged to ask for your assistance in a little affair. Somewhat distasteful, but regrettably essential. You know that I am concerned to prevent the revolutionary authorities finding the secret royal correspondence that might be embarrassing or dangerous to my patrons. I learn that they are somehow closer in their hunt. I must take more active measures to obstruct them.’ He took a mouthful of wine, savoured it. His eyes came onto his companion again. ‘You are somehow uncomfortable, my dear fellow.’ Marinus looked even more uncomfortable. ‘I have it: you grieve that you will not, after all, get your hands on a Lully tonight.’
‘You could have sent me so much instruction in a two-line paper, and stayed safe.’
Arnim reflected on this. ‘Hardly civil, my dear sir. And besides, where should be the pleasure in that?’
Marinus gazed at him. ‘Karl Arnim: a mighty soul, a poison capsule on his finger, and immortal. Is that it?’
‘Let us not be sentimental, dear Marinus. I practise prudence in the face of the threats of these revolutionaries; but they shall not unman me. Karl Arnim goes where he pleases.’
Guilbert’s relationship with the sergeant of police of Meaux had started badly. He knew the man and knew his character from his face alone. Competent. Steady. Rather stupid. Not disposed to work. Guilbert had asked if there’d been any sign of the man Bonfils, wanted by the Ministry of the Interior, and the man had stood slowly and looked at him as if he was trying to throw his weight around unnecessarily, and suggested that they nip over to the Rose to check, nowhere else he’d have stopped, the Grenadier and the Sphinx are too far off, might get ourselves a little something while we’re there, and Guilbert had felt the slow irritation in himself, you should have – But he swallowed it. ‘Right on every point, brother.’ Dullard.
In the Rose, the innkeeper’s book showed that Bonfils had stayed the previous night.
Guilbert had turned slowly to look at the sergeant, again fighting down his anger. If the man had been doing his job, Bonfils would have been held already. The sergeant was looking at him, but there was no sign of embarrassment. Too bloody stupid even to see it. ‘Right-ho,’ the sergeant said. ‘We’ll pick him up tomorrow then,’ and he turned back to the innkeeper.
The innkeeper had looked at them both, uneasily. Guilbert’s face, if not the sergeant’s, had showed him that somehow he was implicated in something regrettable.
‘Well now, old comrade,’ the sergeant started. ‘Inconvenience for us both, if my friend here from Paris can’t catch up with his important witness because we didn’t see him.’ He’d nodded slowly at his own thought, and Guilbert had watched him with interest. ‘Satisfaction for us both, and we’ll split a drink, if you happened to be checking his luggage to see that all was in order, and found a hint of where he was going.’ The voice rumbled on quietly. ‘Or, say, you were helping him on with his coat and making sure no coins fell out, and you overheard him talk to the ostler or the coachman and say where he was headed.’
Guilbert watched it with appreciation. The man knew the rhythms of his own little world.
And the innkeeper had said ‘Montmirail’, and smiled in relief.
Now Guilbert and the sergeant of police of Meaux sat side-by-side on a bench, toasting their unbooted feet against the sergeant’s fire. Companionable. The unspoken shared pleasures of men of shared experience.
Guilbert was telling him about how he’d frightened old Xavier Bonfils’s sister, and the sergeant was nodding slow approval.
On the other side of Meaux, Sir Raphael Benjamin was reviewing his situation with the help of a bottle of wine.
‘Montmirail,’ the innkeeper at the Rose had said to the two men at the counter, and standing just three paces away Raph Benjamin had heard it clear.
The destination was handy confirmation. The fact that there were other men after the royal servant was not a surprise. But damned risky nonetheless.
It had been easy enough to find out who Bonfils was, with a police and National Guard hunt out for him. The gossips knew Bonfils had lived in Paris, but had not been found there yet. Benjamin had long cultivated the acquaintance of a sergeant of the National Guard quartered at the St-Denis gate of Paris, and his sergeant had confirmed the search – way I have it, I’m to let the whole Prussian army past me here long as I get this valet – and the lack of success to dat
e.
The conversation with Emma Lavalier had been short, and sour. He’d claimed a note from Greene asking him to learn what he could of the search for Bonfils. Emma obviously doubted the story. As she was so in with the revolutionaries these days, she might hear something.
‘If you must make me a whore, Benjamin, you might have the character to make me your whore, and not just pass me down the line.’
‘I’m obliged to play the pimp and not the prince, Emma. When my life is as easy as your new friends’, you will no doubt find me as charming.’
He took a mouthful of wine, glanced once around the shabby inn, fit setting for his mood. His anger at his predicament had made him graceless. Another mouthful. And Emma had been uncomfortable because he was right.
Her face when she’d told him, a day later, that Interior Minister Roland had information that Bonfils had a sister in the rue Rameau, where the police had called and found nothing. Her voice: cold; blunt; and somehow very sad.
Another mouthful, in the Sphinx inn.
He recalled the boldness; it flushed him like the wine. He’d watched the street outside Bonfils’s sister’s house a full hour; watching for watchers. Then the knock, and the paper pushed under the door, a calculation of the wariness of Bonfils’s beleaguered family. A servant of the master of the servant. It had worked: the hint of loyalty to Bonfils’s King, guarded enough for the sister to feel she wasn’t committing a crime by owning the relationship. She’d opened the door, a scared pale thing. Benjamin had got no farther than the hall. He repeated his loyalty in the same discreet terms. He said he knew Bonfils had been here – and it worked; she didn’t deny it. He said he knew Bonfils had gone. He wondered if she knew whither. The sister had shaken her head. He gave no hint? Shake of the head, the eyes big and pinked in the pale lined face. Madame, I can help him . . . And then she’d snapped, hissed. ‘He’s gone, the old idiot. An old idiot with his old dreams, wandering out into the mud; didn’t know where he was going himself, probably. Hardly any clothes even. Just a little case. Silly little man, with a silly little case under one arm and his silly book clutched under the other.’ Then she was shaking her head again and hurrying him out and choking on her own breaths. A last inspiration on the doorstep: your brother, Madame; where was he born? Where was his boyhood? And she’d looked at him with something like relief, and he’d known he’d won. ‘Montmirail.’
Another mouthful. And then his attention shifted.
A man had walked in and gone straight to the counter. He’d murmured something to the innkeeper behind it – big brute; hangdog face – and then he’d shown something – something cupped in his hand – and the innkeeper had nodded to a door beside him.
Benjamin forced his eyes down to the table. Mustn’t show attention. It was curious, because another man had gone the same way a little while earlier. Benjamin hadn’t seen any of the hand business, but now he realized there had been something furtive, something that had jarred.
He glanced up from his goblet. The new arrival had gone, through the door by the counter.
One had gone in and not returned. Now another had followed. Not the privy.
Wine-warmed and curious, he felt the appeal of the forbidden and the chancy. And if it was a card game, perhaps they’d welcome another for the pot. He was up and at the door in three strides. ‘Privy through here, is it? Tha-’
‘No, Monsieur!’ The man’s arm was out and blocking his way before the words were finished.
Pretending irritation rather than his actual satisfaction, Benjamin considered the arm, and then the face. I’ll take that as confirmation. The man recovered himself. ‘Your pardon, Monsieur. The privy is through the door over here.’ Benjamin let himself be led.
The layout was ideal. The privy was on one side of a back yard, and the windows looking onto the yard surely included that of the forbidden room. Benjamin tolerated the minimum time appropriate for the pit, then slipped back out into the yard. He considered all of the windows of the inn; none showed a face, and the yard was deserted. He crossed to the window that he judged to be the one he was after.
Eventually his sight adjusted enough to realize that he was staring not at a curtain but at a storeroom in total darkness. He moved along one.
This window did have a curtain – a bit of sack, anyway – and there was light behind it. He pressed his ear hard against the glass.
‘ – priests hiding at the farm already, and they can’t stay. It’s folly to think things’ll be back as they were, not anytime soon.’
‘The Prussians are – ’
‘The Prussians are gone, and they’ll not be back awhile.’
‘His Majesty lives. His Majesty –’
‘His Majesty is prisoner of the Revolution, and whatever happens he’ll not be able – ’
The door opened and someone splashed across the yard to the privy. Benjamin turned slowly, checking that he was all in darkness. Then he slipped back across the yard to the door.
Not a private card game. Not an obliging daughter or maid. Instead, a bit of local royalist conspiracy.
He returned to his bottle.
Greene, who used to be such a blade, had got more interested in the secrecy and the sport, and dragged him in willy-nilly. The occasional spree around Paris – the memory of the two jewels, still safely hidden – was one thing. Cheap wine and rural hovels and running errands for unknown grinders in London was something else. Anger – hot and twisting in his gut – at that letter, with its haughty certainty that they had him by the balls and he’d do what they wanted. Another mouthful of wine. Sickness at his fugitive existence, the pitiful reality of his family, the nasty aftertaste of glorious sins. Another mouthful.
Raph Benjamin the sportsman was fading. And so was Emma Lavalier.
He’d presence enough to stop drinking. Yes, the innkeeper had a room free, and yes of course Monsieur would be their most honoured guest, only a king’s ransom of a tariff – one sou per louse – and would Monsieur be kind enough to give his name for the register?
His name? Yes – the authorities were become most insistent on these bureaucratic points. The innkeeper looked more hangdog than ever.
And Benjamin hesitated: his fool’s errand, and here he was putting up at the meeting-place of the local royalists, and the insistent bureaucrats struck him as a much more efficient force than the local gentry whingeing about the priests hiding in their attics.
‘My name’s Kinnaird. Keith Kinnaird. May I spell it for you?’
Lavalier had come to realize that, more and more, she was surviving in oases – private oases, somehow hidden from the desert outside. Her salon, alone. The stone summer house with the woods behind and the open landscape before. The garden of the Carmelites. A bath. And her dressmaker’s temple of fabrics. She could have fittings at home, or leave the business to Colette, but she liked to walk and she loved to hide in the little parlour at the front of the shop, nestling among the bolts of cloth and imagining herself drifting among the swags of lighter material that seemed to drop from the skies.
It was quiet and cosy; it was elegant, sitting on the best chair and sipping at coffee. She was treated with regal distance, by the dressmaker occasionally popping in to check she was still comfortable, by the faint curtseys offered by the maids who came to chase their mistresses’ commissions, and indeed by the young scruffy messenger boy who came in on an errand with his younger scruffier friend and, seeing Lavalier sitting in state, made a theatrical bow. She could feel safe and she could think.
Connections with others had ceased to be merely amusements, and become affiliations, and they risked becoming accusations. To be associated with the right person might be useful. To be associated with the wrong person would be dangerous. The strange Scotsman, Kinnaird, had been at her house twice, and now he was a fugitive, hunted by the revolutionary authorities. Dangerous for her. Raph Benjamin wasn’t a hunted fugitive, but that was probably because the authorities didn’t know half of what he got up to. Sh
e wondered where he was now. To meet any foreigner was become an act of diplomacy, or of treason.
And her French acquaintances? The divisions were becoming more stark. The Rolands seemed so moderate – so safe; but Roland was weak, and vulnerable now, and whispers were becoming discussions. Danton? Danton was untouchable, surely. But prominence brought its own risks.
It was becoming impossible to be loyal to everyone.
Someone else was passing in front of her; it startled her a moment, because she hadn’t heard the door. A young woman walked through the parlour towards the back, saw Lavalier, made a curtsey without catching her eyes, and continued on her errand. Half a minute later she was back, message delivered, and making for the front door.
‘It’s . . . Gérard, isn’t it? I think . . . Lucie?’
The young woman stopped, and turned to face her.
‘Lucie Gérard, Madame, yes.’
‘How does your father, Lucie?’
Lucie had broken eye contact, and was talking to Lavalier’s feet. ‘He’s . . . he’s well, I supp-’
‘I was being polite, child. I know your father’s state, and I know the state of prices and trade.’ Lucie looked her in the face now, unsure.
‘How . . . how do you do, Madame?’
She was a pale uncertain thing in the quiet of the parlour, like another swoop of lace drifting with the air currents from the front door. Lavalier smiled. ‘Thank you for the courtesy. I suppose you know my reputation, Lucie.’ Lucie said nothing. ‘Well, the market’s as bad for women like me as it is for apothecaries.’
Lucie glanced at the cocoon of fabrics, of which Emma Lavalier in her lovely frock was the natural inhabitant. ‘You seem settled enough.’
‘I hope so, Lucie. That seeming is everything. Dupont silently allows me to increase my debt here, partly because he thinks that other women will follow me, less notorious and more solvent, and more because none of us – none of us, Lucie – wants to admit that it has all become impossible.’ Lucie was trying to understand it. ‘Will you take a little coffee?’
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