Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  ‘I can’t pretend it is the wisest course, Mr – ’

  ‘Sir, each man must be who he is. I find that I have not been myself as well as I could. If you will pardon an allusion more familiar to us both: I have found in trade that a man should not let it become known that he is easy to cheat.’

  Marinus smiled; nodded.

  He seemed to gather himself. ‘Allow me, Mr Kinnaird, to offer such context as I may. Perhaps because of my affairs and my contacts, you have speculated that I am likewise linked to irregular dealings involving foreign citizens. I own nothing of the kind. Because of the coincidence of our invitations, you speculate that I must in some way have an equivalence with you. I acknowledge the logical possibility, but I do not own the fact. Yet as a man active and connected in some of the circles of interest to you, I make the following points.’ His hands were crossed on his folded legs. Now he opened one palm, and began to count out. ‘Point the first: this is a world in ferment. In fever. Point the second: it is a marketplace, in which all habits and restraints have been removed. Grand prices may be secured for a bale of cloth or a barrel of powder; royal fortunes for a paper. But a man may as easily get his throat cut. Point the third: the normal possibilities of exchange between foreigners – men who gain their margin by the relative scarcity of that powder or that paper – are much magnified by the politics of the nations. Point the fourth: at the same time, and it is hardly to be wondered at, the world of the foreigners, and the intricacies of such trade, attract the greatest suspicions from our hosts.’

  He paused. Kinnaird waited.

  At last Marinus’s right index finger touched his left thumb, and now he lifted the thumb, and waggled it at Kinnaird. ‘Point the fifth, Mr Kinnaird: your acquaintance Mr Greene was a grand specimen of the phenomenon. I would not own any familiarity with him, but, as I have told the authorities, when they interrogated me after that affair at the Galerie – not all of us, Mr Kinnaird, are as fast out of a window, and some of us find it less obtrusive not to try – but, as I say, I own and owned to having met him in semi-public once or twice. It seemed that he enjoyed an occasional grand trade. It seemed, from his manner, that he did not care how licit the cargo. By character and by context he was the kind of man to benefit maximally from the times. And he was likewise the most dangerous and vulnerable. You will have been suspect merely as a foreigner, Mr Kinnaird. You will have been doubly suspect by association. And trebly suspect by your insistence on asking questions.’ He refolded his hands. ‘As you will know as well as I, it does not do to spread doubt in the market.’

  Kinnaird absorbed it all. He nodded, slowly, sincerely.

  Then he smiled. ‘And you, Mr Marinus? Might I ask with whom you habitually trade?’

  Hand on heart. ‘I would prefer you not to oblige of me a discourteous answer.’

  They both smiled.

  ‘Mr Kinnaird . . . If I – If I should wish to transact some business with you, how may I find you?’

  ‘I am staying – ’ He hesitated. Marinus affected to examine his glass. ‘I fancy we are men of the same cloth, Mr Marinus, and I fancy we have ways enough to dish each other. I’ll tell you how to find me, although you still won’t find me unless I wish it.’ Marinus nodded. ‘I am sheltering with some acquaintances I met on the road. I am living in Maudi’ville.’

  Marinus frowned at the name. ‘I don’t know it.’

  ‘Except when it wishes to,’ – Kinnaird smiled – ‘it doesn’t exist.’

  Later – an hour unknown, a day unknown – Edward Pinsent sat slumped against the wall, the mattress rucking up beneath him.

  He was staring at the picture of his two girls.

  He had memories of them. Memories of himself with them – holding them, playing with them; in these memories, the girls were happy and he was smiling benign.

  He heard them giggling.

  It was possible the memories were dreams.

  He was supposed to be replaying his life: recalling, searching. But each time he happened to glimpse something that he thought might be true, it made him wince. Discomforts, and embarrassments, and losses, and betrayals, and shame. He couldn’t see a single smile.

  Raph. He thought he could recall Raph smiling.

  Raph was dead.

  He flexed his hand.

  He looked at the picture again. He was sure he could hear them giggling.

  He raised his hand.

  The picture seemed misty. He couldn’t see his girls clearly. Somehow, he heard them.

  Downstairs, they heard the pistol shot: alarm, and immediately they were waiting for something else, something worse, a knock at their own door. Gradually the alarm subsided. They did not investigate. These are terrible times, and terrible things happen. It’s best to leave strangers alone.

  12TH NOVEMBER, 1792

  Strange heralds

  Sir,

  Welsh Williams continues popular here; and why should he not? For if they know not what he can do, it seems they know he can do no harm. Not to France, at any rate. He continues to heat up the matrons of the salons, while bustling between the political offices trying to convince them of the peaceableness of a more refined element in British society, and spread the spirit of fraternal love. I don’t say the ministry couldn’t do with a dose, but in these days their preoccupations are otherwise, and it were as well to try to pacify a tiger by offering him a titmouse. Interior Minister Roland has had Williams made a citizen of France. (Little Matthews, one fears, had to be content with one of the lithographs of Danton being hawked on the Embankment.) Perhaps he thinks this shall save him at the last trump; myself I shall trust to a closed coach and a well-fed four. Of more interest, he has had two meetings with Lebrun, at that time temporarily Minister for War. Perhaps he thinks it fittest to take his message of peace to the cradle of belligerence; more likely he had introductions to Lebrun, for Lebrun is of the faction of the Gironde, and these gentler fellows – such also is Brissot – seem to be Williams’s acquaintances in France.

  He may find that he has come too late, though, for the growing military success and warlike spirit in Paris is matched by the eclipsing of the Girondins, and the man who inclines to peace and to pacific souls may find himself soon out of fashion.

  I must also report a meeting with the elusive Kinnaird – for I confide it was he, though he was most delicate to obscure the point. It is my habit to take a turn in the Gardens before supper, and he contrived to greet me there most discreetly, at dusk, such that we might not either of us be embarrassed by the encounter. (I have had fellows turning up at my very door, which is rank amateurism and damned ill manners with it.) He confirmed who I was, and gave his name as Mackay, or McCorkadale, or it may have been Louis-the-King for all the credit I gave it. At the end of our encounter I asked him to repeat his name, saying that I had forgot it quite, for it seemed a name as did not quite suit him, and if he was in earnest was there not some other name that might not do him as well, and he said that no, there was not, not that a man such as I would want to be obliged to own to having met, or to be put to the trouble of denying, which I call prudent and most courteous. But I hazard that this was the mysterious Kinnaird, for there are surely few Scotsmen, peculiar race though they may be, loitering in the public gardens of Paris under tomfool names on errands of intrigue, especially not now the evenings are become much cooler.

  Our conversation was the prettiest exchange of discretions that two gentlemen could wish for. He made no crass assertions of my status, inclinations or activities, merely confided that he had understood me to be a man who interested himself discreetly in trade and in public affairs, and that my nationality gave me a nice distinction in the current ferment; he owned himself, in a small way, a man likewise interested in the affairs of the moment, and was no more bold than to suggest that should occasions make our acquaintance more easy, we might the both find it congenial to exchange data of interest. I thought this all most becoming, and told him that should he ever find himself able to p
resent himself openly at my door without risk of discomfiture he’d be my honoured guest at supper, and that for the meantime he should feel at liberty to accost me in the twilight whensoever the mood took him. He took it all most courteously, and withdrew as prudently as he had come.

  This, then, I take to be Kinnaird, who seems to feature ever larger in the imaginations of the police, or so I understand from my acquaintances privy to their preoccupations. A lean fellow, with a good steady bearing; his eye clear and watchful. And above all a man apparently born to discretion, and that’s a treasure in these boisterous times.

  E. E.

  [SS F/24/152 (DECYPHERED)]

  Fouché watched Emma Lavalier for a long time.

  He was invisible to her, behind her in the shadows, and it gave him leisure to contemplate her body, and her reactions, without the unsettling scrutiny of those eyes.

  She gleamed like the moon in the night, down here in this Paris cellar.

  He considered her back: stiff, tight-bound, and distilling itself into the neck that swept up under the dark curls. It had been her back and her neck he had glimpsed that night at Roland’s, the guest of Madame Roland.

  He tried to read her reaction to the body on the boards in front of her. There had been no physical reaction, but he waited for something in the tilt of the head, or even just the breathing. He hoped to catch something of an expression, even though her face was away from him. But she was absolutely still.

  Death had no interest for Fouché. Humans were meat, and dead bodies were how they all ended. But he was fascinated by the reaction of others to death.

  The man on the boards had been her lover; so the rumours said. What does a woman feel, when the body that has been warmth and life to her is laid out cold and dead? Does she remember him warm, and deny the death? Or does she wonder how she could ever have mistaken the wax statue for life?

  Emma Lavalier was silent, and still.

  Fouché had wondered if she might throw herself on the body of Sir Raphael Benjamin, in grief and in passion. At least a touch, a tremulous hand outstretched – to what was lost; to what awaited her as much as anyone.

  But nothing.

  A servant lurked in the darkness at the other end of the body – a shadowed, shuffling figure who’d followed in a few paces behind the lady, presumably to help carry the dead Englishman out. She wouldn’t want to show emotion in front of a servant, naturally. But tonight, alone, what might she cry into the night? When that bodice was untightened, and she was alone.

  Fouché stepped forwards. He saw the sudden tightness, in the tendons in her neck and the muscles in her jaw.

  Emma had assumed Fouché would be there. Another triumph over his enemies. A triumph over her. He would wish to enjoy it. He would wish to take advantage.

  ‘Your invitations are surprisingly irresistible, Monsieur Fouché,’ she said without turning.

  She didn’t see his reaction; half smile, half wince.

  There were various things he could have said: that she kept suspicious friends; that she and the dead man had been lovers. Instead he said: ‘You’d said he had been of your circle. I thought that . . . his friends; or his people.’

  Now she faced him. ‘Thank you,’ she said; and meant it.

  Fouché stepped away from her, and accordingly she felt her breaths easing. But it was only a couple of steps, and he was knocking at a long plain box which she hadn’t noticed in the gloom. A closed box up on trestles; a coffin.

  Having knocked, he cocked his head as if listening for reply, and his eyes shone at her in some mad delight. It was such a ludicrous performance, and she knew it utterly unlike him, and wondered how much he had rehearsed it; wondered at the odd obsessions in this stiff pale man.

  ‘That one you may take,’ he said. ‘This one’ – he pointed at the box beside him – ‘we will keep a little longer.’ She felt her breath coming out in a hiss. ‘Another foreign friend. Mr Greene.’

  She merely nodded.

  ‘We are not yet satisfied with the story of this one. There may yet be signs, from his clothes. He seemed to attract trouble, this one. We will keep him a little longer, and we will see what he attracts.’

  She was suddenly aware of her position relative to these men; to all men. Standing between the dead bodies of two lovers; strange and in their way exotic foreigners, who had brought something of their different world and had promised a new world of amusement and had not been strong enough to survive the experiment. Benjamin and Greene had been pleasure, and possibility, and that door had closed. Now they were a stained past she would have trouble escaping; they were vulnerability.

  And closer to her Fouché, the new world not of romance and escape, but of endless accusation and threat, of the remorseless scrutiny of her actions and even her thoughts. An unknown, unstable future. And there was another man in the cellar, the attendant: there was always, of course, someone watching silently from the shadows.

  ‘If this carries on, Monsieur Fouché, there’ll be none of my salon left to invite; and then I suppose it’ll have to be you, won’t it?’

  Fouché was startled. Not the words, but the tone. She hadn’t spoken bitterly, or in sorrow. It had been a mild pleasantry, and utterly controlled. Suddenly he saw her as she was: not some gilded court adornment, but someone who knew about scuffling to get a foot in the door; someone calculating. She wasn’t a victim, or an obstacle, but . . . a fellow-player?

  Or a rival?

  ‘Any deed would be worth that honour, Madame.’

  ‘You could have just asked.’

  ‘Yes; I suspect I could.’ He realized that he could, and it came as another lesson about her.

  ‘Marie-Jeanne Roland has a much more notable circle,’ she said. ‘But I’m sure you’d find mine more interesting.’

  ‘I have no doubt of it.’ Fouché was uncomfortable in the pleasantries now. He nodded towards the silent attendant in the shadows. ‘I shall send a man to help your servant with the body.’

  Emma glanced at the attendant, as if noticing him for the first time, and nodded. Then she turned to Fouché and nodded more formally. ‘Thank you.’

  Fouché left, a scratch of bootsteps disappearing down the damp passage.

  Silence, and stillness, and then at last Emma Lavalier came close to the body on the boards, to the frozen features, and bowed her head.

  ‘And you, Mr Kinnaird?’ she said softly without looking up. ‘If you’re wanting an invitation to my salon, you’ve an even stranger way of going about it than that creature.’

  The face of the attendant lifted, and the shadows on it shifted, and a half-closed eye opened and the head pulled out of its hunch and Keith Kinnaird glanced intently around the cellar. ‘I’m a sight more desperate than he, I should say.’

  She repeated his checking of the cellar, and the entrance to the passage, still grappling with his wholly uncharacteristic boldness. ‘And rather more enterprising, it seems. I didn’t see you coming in with me.’

  ‘I came up behind you as you entered, and they assumed me with you. No one notices servants, even in revolutionary France.’ His lip curled, and she heard the scorn against himself. ‘A foolish dare to myself, perhaps, and I fancied it might prove useful to know the rhythms and weaknesses of this building.’

  She saw the calculating man, and remembered his calm in her salon when he’d visited after her first interrogation. ‘You risk becoming permanently acquainted with it. The ministry is easier entered than departed.’

  ‘The last weeks have taught me to measure risk anew.’ He stepped quickly to the coffin at the side of the cellar. For a moment he let his palm run over the rough timber. Then he took a breath and lifted the lid, keeping the opening away from Emma.

  His face revolted at the sight, but he forced his glance. The contents were as advertised. The late Henry Greene, getting later all the time. Kinnaird tried to find the face he remembered. But his memories were elusive now.

  The side of the head was misshapen.
Greene had been hit there: something rough; something fatal.

  They’d tossed some powder over the body, presumably to contain the stench; it wasn’t doing much for the stench, and only made the man more strange than ever, part statue part ghost.

  Then Kinnaird was glancing around the cellar: its arches and deeper shadows, an ancient rotting barrel and, against one wall, an empty coffin – ready for Benjamin. He saw her watching him, and stopped a moment. She was still; poised; composed. ‘You were magnificent,’ he said, nodding towards where Fouché had left. ‘He’s not comfortable about you, but he’s getting used to you.’

  ‘That,’ she said, looking into the darkness of the passageway, ‘is now France. It is no longer a matter of supporting or resisting; of liking or repelling. One must accommodate.’ He nodded, watching her face, trying not to let his admiration distract him. ‘And this one?’ she asked, nodding down at the body of Sir Raphael Benjamin.

  She saw it herself. Remembered his hungry vitality. Remembered his touch. She wished she could feel something.

  Kinnaird stepped forwards, and looked once along the length of the man.

  ‘Cheap boots,’ he said.

  Their eyes met over the body, and they each wondered at the other, hunted the weaknesses; and the eyes held steady.

  Footsteps tramped damply towards them. ‘Place him in the coffin and carry him carefully,’ Emma said louder, and in French. ‘He deserves respect.’ Kinnaird bowed his head, and it stayed bowed as a guard appeared from the passageway.

  Raph Benjamin was not a small body, and Kinnaird and the guard made heavy work of carrying the coffin. Emma Lavalier walked ahead of them. She wanted to hurry. She wanted to be free of this place. She wanted to escape the ghastly box that was following her, like a terrible memory she couldn’t forget. But she knew that Kinnaird was safer in her entourage, and for some uncomfortable reason that seemed important now. She also knew that haste would attract attention.

  She walked on, steady, feeling the tension in her thighs and her belly.