Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  Lucie glanced towards the back, and the hidden majesty of Dupont. ‘Thank you Madame, but I shouldn’t.’

  ‘I decided a long time ago to give up on “shouldn’t”.’

  ‘And you’ve found a way to live on it, Madame. Me, I’ve had to take the other way. No one sees me, Madame, and that suits me fine.’

  It was a lovely, wild, lost face. Lavalier wanted to stroke it. ‘Yes. Yes, I see. And you lost your mother . . . some time back, I think.’ Lucie nodded. ‘I confess I understand nothing of the mother’s instinct, and little of the daughter’s, but it’s a strange path you’ve had to walk, isn’t it?’ Still silence. ‘And yet you endure. You survive. I see you everywhere, always walking, always in the background, always . . . just always. You took messages for some of my British friends, I think. For that extraordinary Scotsman.’

  Lucie nodded.

  ‘And now they are all running and hiding, and my salons are more boring. I thought the police would easily catch the man Kinnaird.’

  Lucie considered her a moment. ‘Not him. I thought so too, but not him. Something . . . strange about him.’ Emma was attentive. ‘Like he’s so stupid he doesn’t know to give up.’

  Emma smiled at this, nodded. ‘I’ve never met anyone like him. So insignificant. And so unnerving. I . . . it’s almost that I fear him – not because he’s dangerous, but because he might be right, and he might be stronger than any of them.’

  ‘He’s sweet on you too.’

  ‘Sweet? I’m not – ’

  ‘He can’t work you out. He thought he could, now he knows he can’t.’

  Emma relaxed again. ‘From him, that’s flattery. Still, with the National Guard of every town in – ’

  ‘He’s away safe. Where they won’t find him. If you’re worried.’

  ‘How do you kn-’

  ‘He’s away safe.’

  ‘And there you are again, Lucie. In the background, and enduring. Remarkable. Lucie, how do you find the new . . . the changes?’

  Lucie shrugged, but it was calculated. ‘What’s changed?’

  Lavalier wondered at it a moment. ‘You just . . . continue to drift? Oblivious?’

  ‘Men are the same. World’s the same. The shit continues to flow, Madame, whoever’s sitting on top.’

  A door slammed at the back of the premises, and they both started; then caught each other’s eyes again.

  Lucie Gérard curtseyed, and Emma Lavalier nodded deeply; conventions restored.

  At the front door, Lucie turned back. ‘Thank you for . . . Thank you for talking, Madame.’

  ‘It was my pleasure.’

  ‘Madame, has your purse been over there, on that table, all this time?’ Lavalier nodded. ‘’Fraid you might find it’s lighter now. The Ribot brothers. I saw them come in. Little Matti distracts, littler Marc has a rummage.’ She hesitated. ‘I know these people.’

  Lavalier didn’t look at the purse. ‘Thank you for your concern.’

  ‘I could tell you where they live. If you’ve missed anything.’

  ‘Thank you for the thought, Lucie. The indignity of chasing them would be worse than the indignity of being tricked. Besides, the purse contains only a few sous. What’s valuable’ – she pointed between her breasts – ‘is tucked safe in here. And little Matti isn’t ready for that yet. What a woman shows and what she values are different.’ She smiled, but it was hard. ‘You see Lucie, I know these people too.’

  His Majesty had always impressed on Maitre Bonfils the importance of flexibility. Impressed it – a word of jocularity, for such was his humour; had he ever had cause to complain at some actual failing of flexibility in Bonfils it would have been once only and Bonfils would have been out of the royal service for ever – and valued it.

  Alone in the dirty lane, trudging through the evening to the dead house, his life shattered and himself thrown out like last night’s pitcher of piss, left to rediscover himself after four decades, surely his flexibility was being over-taxed. Could His Majesty really have intended this? Imagined this?

  He trudged on towards his . . . his home?

  His Majesty was imprisoned now, by murderers and rebels and the world had gone mad.

  His Majesty had always impressed on Maitre Bonfils the importance of correctness. Impressed it by manner alone, by divinely given assumption of utter deference and of the most perfect attention to his needs. And valued it in so far as Bonfils remained the only commoner permitted – after decades of faultless service – conversation with His Majesty, and that only by invitation and when the affairs of the royal household required it.

  His present condition was surely not correct.

  He had been travelling for many days, from the madness of Paris towards some dull animal feeling of sanctuary in the village of his forefathers, and he smelt like it. Days of summer heat, cooking his sweat under the formal coat it would be sacrilege to remove in public. Intermittently some fluctuation in the breeze would raise his own stink to his face, and his nose would shy and strain. Ghastly indignity; the most unimaginable lapse of standards.

  He’d only arrived late last night, and the house was musty and unknown, and immediately this morning he’d trudged back to the village to arrange food and the possibility of a servant.

  There was a stain on his left sleeve, down near the cuff, and he could not remove it with brushing or water. There was grease in it, he knew. He thought he knew whence it came, too: the tavern two nights back, the walls clammy with years of damp and the endless condensation of kitchen steam, a brute of a man serving him – What is service, Bonfils? Service is utter devotion to the needs of the master, Maitre – an unguarded movement of recoil when the man spilled soup on the table – oh to be able to whip such a man, to be able to banish him from such employment for ever, to break him – and his sleeve brushing the wall. He shuddered at the thought. Even in the greying of evening, the patch on the sleeve glowered darker.

  He felt self-pity rising in his gut. Felt his face crumpling, and tried to collect himself. This landscape – these fields, these mourning royalist willows – was supposed to be home; the land of his people, the place where he had been born, a mother’s warmth and familiar rooms and spring smells and running barefoot to a river and knowing friendship for the first time. But he had left it as a young boy and remembered little. He felt nothing for it, and this might be the saddest loss of all.

  The house was his pension, bought ten years previously on advice tendered in a moment of excess informality by the Comte de Fleury, and visited only once – a curiosity, when the royal household had visited the Champagne in the spring of ’87. Now it was to become, he supposed, the rest of his abandoned masterless life.

  His left foot felt damp. He shifted it slightly inside the boot. The good footman shall train his body to be able to stand in perfect stillness one full hour, and then train his mind to endure longer. The tricks of a life spent in the most obsessively formal chambers in Europe.

  There was a hole in the boot, surely. And no one to fix it.

  You are permitted no feelings, Bonfils, until your duty is done! Old Pierrepont, his predecessor; his master. When is your duty done, Bonfils? Dead these twenty years now, surely. My duty is never done, Maitre.

  He walked on.

  The Revolution was seeking him. He had read the proclamation. There had been little else on his mind for the last forty-eight hours. After the indignities the wretches had forced on His Majesty, did they now want to punish his servants too?

  The road was a corridor. The stones that showed paler in the last of the sun were the gleam of light on a polished floor. The avenue of trees passed regular and stiff beside him as he walked, like the sentries at Versailles, unseen eyes that watched him as he approached the Royal presence. He trudged on, dead to his aches, mind numbed as a junior foot-sore footman.

  Still, perhaps it was better to present himself. He had seen the violence of the Revolution, and he had seen its unstoppable power. He could never outrun thos
e mobs; he could never hide. Better to present himself and answer their questions honestly.

  Obedience. Correctness. Virtue.

  Old Xavier knew himself not so old. But his fifty years – forty of them in the royal service, dust boy to steward, never a day of sickness, never a moment of inattention – felt like a century. The darkness had closed around him, alone and abandoned in this lane, and the world had changed and he was ancient.

  At last the house, dead in front of him and in his heart. He opened the back door – it was still wrong to use the front – and felt his exhaustion swelling as he stepped into the parlour. And then his heart burst in his chest.

  There was an appalling tattered figure slumped in the chair and leering at him.

  He spun away, mewing in fright and scrabbling at the door again. It opened, and the evening was blocked by an enormous shadow rising over him.

  Guilbert had woken early and ridden steadily to Montmirail without a break. He’d gone straight to the Hôtel de Ville and, blood up from the ride and chase, required assistance in the search for the man Xavier Bonfils. The clerk seemed to know the name, seemed to remember the family had had property in the area. With the vague but ominous power of the Ministry of the Interior hanging over him, he’d hurried off to make enquiries about where in the district Bonfils might have gone.

  Guilbert had taken his boots off, and found a lump of bread and a half-empty flask of wine.

  Feet up, he had considered royal documents, and foreign agents. And he had considered Fouché, and then Danton, as if testing the uncertain rungs of a ladder.

  The clerk had been back inside two hours. Xavier Bonfils had bought a house in the area a few years back. A courteous nod, and Guilbert had pulled on his boots and been up and out and mounting his horse.

  After his little imposture as the Scotsman Kinnaird at the Sphinx, Benjamin had left by the back door and taken the opportunity to reinforce the imposture at the inn of the Rose. He contrived to find the innkeeper there alone – earnest hand on arm – sombre whispered words – ‘Pray do not say one word, dear Monsieur. You must not incriminate yourself, I beg you’ – natural alarm on the man’s face – ‘But if you serve the noble cause that I believe you serve – the cause of legitimate and godly rule in this country – know that you have a friend in me’.

  The innkeeper looked even more alarmed; glanced over Benjamin’s shoulders. Benjamin had nodded reassuring sympathy. ‘You had my dear acquaintance Bonfils here, I know. No, no: not a word. On his way homewards, of course. It has been a hard time for good men.’

  And the innkeeper had nodded, and Benjamin had savoured it.

  ‘How long ago did he leave? I had wondered if I might catch him on the road.’

  Late morning, the innkeeper had said. No coach had been due for a couple of days, and Bonfils had taken a horse instead.

  ‘Just a horse? He had nothing to carry?’

  ‘He carried nothing. Left his little bag here with me to send on when the coach comes through.’

  And Benjamin had nodded, again the sympathy, and again he’d laid his earnest hand on the man’s arm. ‘Your commitment earns my deepest respect, sir, in these times.’ Then his other hand came discreetly over the counter. ‘I have written my name on this paper, in case you should wish to pass it to friends who need a friend.’ Last heavy nod of sympathy, enormous tip and away into the night.

  Or not quite away. First he’d loitered in the darkness, waiting until something – in the end it was a most opportune brawl – brought the innkeeper outside. Then he’d slipped back into the inn and into the storeroom. There were three bits of luggage there, but only one was a bag small enough to match the innkeeper’s and the sister’s description of what Bonfils had carried. The catches opened to Benjamin’s knife.

  He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Some new hint about the man, about why he might be useful to the revolutionaries or to London. Some extra information about where he was going. Something that would enable him to seem to know the man better, or to influence him. Whatever useful thing he might have found in the little case, it wasn’t there.

  The man had been some sort of servant to the King, and for a prolonged period. If so, this case was a pitiful residue of a life. Some clean shirts and stockings. Two candlesticks. A pair of tiny matching volumes: a bible and a prayer book. A block of soap. A brush for shoes or coat. A spare set of false teeth.

  It made his quarry seem smaller, his errand less grand. He’d closed the bag, and slipped out into the night again, this time for good.

  He’d slept rough. Well out of the way of whoever else was on Bonfils’s trail, straw under him and a warm darkness above. Then a day’s ride, and he’d gone straight to the inn in Montmirail and started asking and a chain of three people in the locality had led him to confirmation that Bonfils had bought a house there, and told him where it was.

  Now he was back in the inn, a good day’s work behind him and a bowl of soup and a bottle of wine in front.

  Silence once more in the house of Xavier Bonfils. Silence from the figure in the parlour chair.

  An eternal silence in the house of Bonfils: Bonfils was gone, and would not step through the door again. He had never spoken aloud, in this house he did not recognize, and now he never would. So there was not even a whisper of an echo of his voice, somewhere in the woodwork or vibrating the spiders’ webs.

  Soon the creatures that had been disturbed by his arrival, the creatures who had come to live in the gaps in the house, would return. They would make more noise in this place than Bonfils ever had, and they would possess it more.

  Still the figure in the chair waited.

  Around the building, jostling close to it, the trees whispered to each other in the breeze, perhaps contemplating how soon it might be seemly for them to reclaim the wood that had been borrowed for the construction of the house.

  Xavier Bonfils was slumped against one of the trees, staring empty-eyed at the home he would never now achieve. The wound in his chest seemed small – a last gesture of restraint; something that might be lost in a crease; just another stain – but it was sufficient. The knife was clutched in his hands.

  The figure in the parlour chair waited, and continued to grin. A wild, strained grin, locked in a distorted face, placed on top of a figure that did not slump and bend as it naturally should, a figure ragged and clammy and most unnatural.

  A figure that had been dead for some time.

  A figure who, more than most, might well grin at the strangeness of it all.

  The figure of Henry Greene.

  3

  The Unquiet Dead

  IN WHICH THE NEW METHOD OF PHILOSOPHICAL ENQUIRY INVIGORATES M. FOUCHÉ’S INVESTIGATION OF THE ROYAL HERITAGE, A SCOTTISH MERCHANT MAKES A TOUR OF REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE, AND SIR RAPHAEL BENJAMIN FINDS A CAUSE

  The Memoirs of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

  (extract from unpublished annex)

  At around this time my hosts in London invited me to produce what they termed ‘an appreciation’ of poor Louis’s correspondence. Ill-judged and damned ill-spelled, was my first reply, but they would insist. In part I think they hoped to entice me into sharing, by the back stairs as it were, a summary of the European secrets that were known in Paris. In part I think there was some game of politics being played among the London government bureaux, and my hosts wanted material to justify a call on the secret fund in order to support intensified operations in France. (Their fathers ran espionage work from their private fortunes and raided the secret fund to go gaming, of course; but England is become of late a more officious place.)

  I offered them a kind of menu de dégustation of French secrets. Nothing genuinely secret – for what is? – but a sumptuous selection drawn from the trivia of European deceit, and hinting at the main dishes. The great men in Paris, royal and revolutionary; Mirabeau, and the Prussians; Franklin the American, and the curious overlaps between American and British espionage – an intense and brilliant rivalry, ex
cept for the men at its heart who in my experience were commonly working for both sides. I gave them, you see, enough to be properly alarmed.

  And I tried to make them understand the true threat of the royal archive: not what it revealed about anyone in particular – though that was bad enough, for me, and for many other great men, in Paris and London and a half a dozen cities besides – but what it revealed about everyone. The nature of European secret diplomacy, and of Louis’s mad hoarding, was that everyone of note across the continent could somehow be implicated. With the mob ready to decapitate you for a scrap of lace, the mere appearance of your name in the royal correspondence could easily be fatal. More than that, a whole way of life would be exposed, the entire system of civilized European discourse. No one of sense was fighting to save aristocrats – generally the least useful and the least charming and the least cultured of people – but there was an essential fight to save aristocracy.

  In this battle of the good order of all society, the lives of the individual agents and officials – innocent or otherwise, whatever that meant – were as chaff in the wind.

  [SS G/66/X3 (EXTRACT)]

  Benjamin contrived to lurk on the edge of the gaggle of idlers watching Bonfils’s house and the activities of the authorities. There wasn’t much to see now, but there wasn’t much else to do either. So the half-dozen of them swapped rumours or smoked a pipe or just stared at the empty house.

  ‘Two dead,’ someone was saying, with a kind macabre satisfaction. ‘Owner and – ’

  ‘Bonfils. Just bought the place.’

  ‘Bought it years ago. Bonfils and a stranger.’

  ‘Robber. Bonfils caught him and there was a fight.’

  ‘Bonfils killed him, but took a fatal wound.’

  ‘Killed himself, he did. Remorse.’