Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  The passageways stretched out for an eternity, dank and grey and hopeless. Still she walked. Still the box trudged indefatigable behind her, still the memory keeping pace with her.

  She could hear the men’s breaths, heavy behind her.

  At last a turn – more discomfort for the men carrying the coffin – and another turn – a thump and a curse and she thought briefly of the live Benjamin, and how his elegance did not deserve this mauling – and then light ahead.

  ‘One moment!’

  Fouché’s voice from somewhere behind her shoulder, a doorway she’d not seen.

  She walked on.

  ‘Our trade, Madame, makes it probable that we shall continue to meet.’ She slowed. ‘I shall hope that more civilized excuses for an invitation will prove more congenial.’

  It broke her stride, and she hesitated.

  It was true. France was changing, and she must change, and she must continue to meet Fouché and men like him.

  She nodded. And walked on.

  The National Convention is brittle. Fouché likes to sit on one of the higher benches, and from this perspective he can see the divisions developing and shifting and firming across the chamber, like cracks racing across ice. He knows that sometime soon the ice will break. It’s becoming important to know where you stand.

  ‘He must die, now! End the danger! End the myth!’

  ‘Louis is our greatest asset. While he lives, the world is reminded of his weaknesses and his failures and his treacheries. While he lives, they will fear what could happen to him.’

  ‘To make a king a hostage? We are become kidnappers now?’

  ‘Enough of these mediaeval fancies!’

  Roland is becoming more uncomfortable. Fouché sees it in his thinness, in the eyes that won’t rest, in the weariness. Roland does not like chaos. Roland does not like extremes. But the ice is thinnest in the centre.

  ‘Try him, now.’

  ‘Try a king? For what? You make the Revolution a puppet-show.’

  And Danton? Fouché thinks. Where does Danton stand? Danton is a big man. If you’re standing next to Danton, you want to be sure the ice is firm.

  ‘On what charge? What point of law? His whole existence is a crime. What would be the purpose of identifying one incident from a life of obscenity? What would be the purpose of remarking one smudge in a sea of excrement?’

  Sometimes Fouché’s mind wanders. He revises documents in his head. He reviews the inter-relationship of documents.

  What would be the purpose of identifying one incident from a life of obscenity?

  Louis’s bizarre gilded life. Ludicrousness and luxury while his nation starved. Games with locksmiths.

  Locksmiths were always being invited.

  So why is the visit of one locksmith remarked in the steward’s book, when none of the others is?

  Emma Lavalier was sprawled on the divan in her parlour, eyes heavy, a pamphlet in her lap that would not be read however hard she came at it, when she heard the knock.

  The knock came from the door to the functional parts of the house – to where Colette was presumably doing whatever she did in the afternoons. Colette usually passed through the door without knocking. Or she would knock and enter.

  Lavalier came fully awake.

  Again the knock.

  ‘Colette?’ she said, voice louder and echoing. She disliked raising her voice.

  Which was precisely why Colette knew that – unless Madame was obviously not to be disturbed – she was expected to move silently through the house.

  Again the knock.

  Lavalier stood. It was not supposed to be like this. It was wrong.

  She walked to the door, feeling her loneliness in the house. Where was Colette?

  She couldn’t remember ever having gone through the door. It was plain; barely visible within the panelling. Beside it, a vase of late roses, frail and pale. Was there even a handle on her side of the door?

  She felt that she ought to knock.

  An unobtrusive brass handle. She pulled at it. ‘Colette?’

  A face was immediately in front of her. A young woman, staring back at her – but not Colette. It was the apothecary’s girl . . . It was Lucie Gérard.

  ‘How did you – ?’

  ‘Benoit the policeman has his afternoon off today; you usually sleep at this hour; so this is when Colette goes out to play with him. Easy to slip in the back door, and it’s close to the trees.’

  Lavalier was angry and amused by it. ‘Truly you know everything, Mademoiselle Gérard.’

  ‘I’m probably not the only one. You should watch your jewels, Madame. Or do you also keep them – ?’ she nodded towards Lavalier’s cleavage.

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’ She opened the door further. ‘And are you after my jewels, Lucie, or why – ?’

  The opening door revealed the man standing behind Lucie.

  Kinnaird bowed his head. ‘Madame.’

  ‘Mr Kinnaird,’ she said, politely, ‘of course. Have you once, in all your time in France, entered somewhere by invitation?’

  ‘I’ve a standing invitation to La Force, I understand; but it’s the one I don’t choose to accept.’

  ‘Naturally. You are,’ Emma said, ‘a most contrary man.’

  ‘It used to be a bad habit. It turns out to be the one thing keeping me alive.’

  ‘Mm. I refuse to lurk in a kitchen. If you’re so anxious for my company, you can enjoy it in the salon.’

  She saw them installed on chairs close to her divan. Kinnaird said, ‘Madame, I – ’

  ‘First of all and most importantly, Lucie: should I fear that Colette may be in trouble?’

  Lucie shook her head. ‘She’s not obliging Benoit yet.’

  ‘Is she not? Truly the Revolution has changed things.’

  ‘When she starts stealing your perfume you should worry.’

  ‘I will have it in mind. Dear Lucie, your sense of poise is charming. But not the stiffness. You have the height – you certainly have the legs – to lie back a little. It suggests control, and will emphasize the features of your lovely young body.’

  Lucie folded her arms. ‘I don’t play other people’s games, Madame.’

  Lavalier smiled. ‘Lord, but you’re a wild beauty, aren’t you? Have you fucked this one?’ Hardly a nod towards Kinnaird. ‘Has he tried?’

  Lucie shook her head, and shrugged. ‘I thought maybe he was the other sort.’

  ‘No . . . ’ Lavalier reviewed it. ‘No, he’s not that. One learns to tell. But he’s choosy, this one. Stubborn. Difficult. It’s rather frustrating; removes one’s greatest power of control. There’s one like him in the Ministry of the Interior.’

  ‘Madame’ – Kinnaird, at last – ‘you disappoint me if the extent of your brilliance relies on men wanting to bed you.’

  Emma Lavalier sat up, neck high and head proud. ‘Monsieur Kinnaird, no man has understood more than one hundredth of my brilliance. You have not seen more than a candle’s glimmer.’ She relaxed against the divan again, laid an arm along a cushion. ‘It’s a matter of courtesy, really. To desire one’s hostess a little is no more than good manners.’

  Kinnaird smiled. ‘As you’ve no doubt observed, Madame, I have no manners. You’re certainly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met. But that’s God and your mother. Much more impressively, you are without doubt the most controlled, the most certain being I’ve ever met. At the same time abandoned and wholly in command, of yourself and your world. Self-contained and yet wholly unbounded.’

  ‘Well, that’s a bit better. And still you wouldn’t deign to throw yourself at me?’

  ‘I’m not so young any more, Madame. My time of chasing dreams is passed. In your embrace a man might find the enchantment of a sorceress or a knife in the back. He certainly would not escape unchanged.’

  ‘What about poor Lucie, then?’

  ‘She’s got trouble enough without my embraces, the poor child.’

  ‘Chi-’


  ‘Monsieur Kinnaird . . . Do you really mean to say that you’re a good man? No wonder you’re so lonely in France.’

  ‘That’s what I came to ask you, Madame. A conversation we’ve twice not been able to finish. I once had pretensions to being a good man. Now the general opinion seems to be so much to the contrary that I’m beginning to doubt it myself.’ He sat forwards. ‘I am hunted, Madame. The National Guard; the police. I must find ways to counter this. You know these men, Madame; they have talked to you of the foreigners of St-Denis, I’m sure. I am forced to live in a gypsy camp. Why?’

  ‘You are the focus of the greatest suspicion, because of your association with Henry Greene, and thereby with the theft of the royal jewels, and with all the other things he might have been involved in, and with his peculiar death. And you have been directly reported in a series of compromising encounters with royalists and anti-revolutionaries. There are documents in the ministry that show all this, and much else.’

  ‘Fictions, created by – ’

  ‘You are hunted by a man named Fouché – you met him there, in the cellar, when we brought out Raph. He is the brightest most active mind in the ministry, with increasing influence over the minister, with full control of the police and the National Guard, and with the most inhuman relentlessness.’

  ‘Would it surprise you to know that I have done approximately none of the things I’m apparently blamed for?’

  ‘Monsieur Kinnaird, in what used to be the most civilized city on earth, there are now massacres in the streets and British spies breaking into ladies’ kitchens. What should surprise me any more?’

  ‘How could I disprove the lies?’

  ‘You cannot, and it would not matter.’ She saw his uncertainty. ‘You are an enemy of the Revolution now. The Revolution needs enemies; it needs victims. It has no use for innocent men.’

  Kinnaird and Lucie took their leave at the door to the kitchen. He looked into Lavalier’s eyes; it was the closest he’d ever been to her. ‘What happened to Henry Greene, Madame?’

  ‘Exactly what is happening to you, now.’ Her head came back, and she considered him with greater perspective. ‘And yet . . . Your predicament is not different to his; but you are different to him. I wonder at you, Monsieur Kinnaird.’ She glanced down, and pulled one of the rose stems out of the vase. Holding it between finger and thumb, she held her other palm against the last blossom of the year, and then crushed it. ‘Beautiful things are dying for ever. I . . . I fear you, because you may, in your stubborn ill-dressed implacable way, be the man of the age. You – like the creature in the ministry – may be the future.’ She gazed into him. ‘I wonder whether one of you must also be my future.’

  His eyes were in hers. ‘We’ve a pretty rough magic in Scotland, but I’ll promise you no knife in the back.’

  She seemed to consider this. A nod, a polite smile.

  He offered her his hand. She took it, and Kinnaird saw too late that she was still holding the rose stem, with its broken flower. Eyes locked on his, she squeezed, and they both winced as the thorns bit.

  Her eyes opened wider, and her lips. ‘Try to feel, Monsieur Kinnaird.’

  He nodded. ‘In your service, Madame. Always.’

  In the end he broke her gaze, with a nod of courtesy, and turned away.

  Lucie made to follow him. ‘Lucie.’ She turned.

  ‘You don’t have to be poor to be a whore, Lucie. What matters is the price you get for it.’

  ‘I’m just trying to survive, Madame. That’s all there is.’

  ‘There must be more.’

  ‘Easier for you, Madame.’

  Lavalier cupped her hand around Lucie’s jaw, and kissed her on the lips.

  ‘We have to live life, Lucie. Otherwise there’s no point in it.’

  In a laundry in Argenteuil, two men watched each other’s outline through steam.

  ‘It’s all there! It must be! The pompous idiot Louis would have kept everything.’

  Karl Arnim nodded soberly. ‘Uncomfortable for you.’

  The face loomed out of the steam close to his. ‘Uncomfortable for you! All of the correspondence between Berlin and Paris, he’ll have kept that. And God knows what Mirabeau will have written.’

  ‘We’re already at war.’

  ‘The mob hasn’t toppled your King yet. Those letters could do it.’

  Arnim’s nose wrinkled. It had been a pleasant ride here, through woods, along the river, placid out of the city. But the laundry was humid, a fog of mysterious vats with ghostly bundles floating in them, a white inferno of steam, and the poisonous sting of lye in his nostrils.

  In his mind, he was recalling the latest letter from the Duke of Brunswick’s camp. The letter was ashes now; there’d been nothing in its rather overwrought words that might prove useful in the future.

  Brunswick would not move against France again this year; it was essential that Prussia’s correspondence with France be secured or destroyed.

  ‘So you must find them.’ Arnim’s voice came more insistent than he had intended. He tempered it: ‘The rewards will be great.’

  ‘Damn your rewards. You’re too late.’

  Arnim’s voice came harsher again. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The shit Fouché. He’s discovered something new; decisive, he thinks. God knows; he’s probably sacrificing chickens in that office of his and reading the entrails. If there was a concealed hiding-place in the Tuileries, only two people would be guaranteed to know it: Louis himself, and the man who helped him conceal it.’ The face loomed out of the steam again. ‘Fouché’s found the locksmith.’

  ‘Found him?’

  ‘Identified him, from palace records. Man named Gamain. François Gamain. He’ll not martyr himself for the Capets, not a locksmith. Fouché’s police are searching for him now – secretly – no proclamations this time – and as soon as they find him he’ll lead them to the trove.’

  ‘There is still time then.’

  ‘To do what? Burn the Tuileries to the ground?’

  Arnim considered. He considered the possibility of burning the Tuileries to the ground, to which he had no great objection except that it was hard to do the thing decisively. Mainly he considered that the conversation – and the relationship – was becoming obnoxious.

  He needed Marinus. ‘There is still time.’

  Alone again in her salon, Emma Lavalier heard again snatches of the conversation.

  It had been a grand performance. She had dazzled her audience.

  So why, when they left, did she feel they were escaping her – leaving her behind?

  Wholly in command, of myself and my world. Kinnaird’s words, and she gloried in their truth.

  Except they weren’t true any more.

  Lucie, just trying to survive. That’s all there is.

  That wonderful wild girl had something to teach her. To live indifferent to the world and its changes, and to survive.

  Because if she had to live in the world, Lavalier would have to choose.

  And her first choice had to be about Kinnaird.

  A man’s indifference to the world’s conventions was the most beautiful thing about him. Once, that indifference had been a statement of morality: a refusal to be limited by social conventions. By that measure, Kinnaird was as boring a man as ever lived.

  But with murder in the streets, a government forced to compete in bloodthirstiness with its mob, indifference was become a statement of existence. A refusal to be limited by France’s new rules, its reality; its chaos.

  By that measure, the lean resilient Britisher was become the most beautiful of men. It was a hidden beauty, sufficient to itself: the strength of the mountain’s age, the force of the river’s flow.

  He offered Emma Lavalier the most glorious example of how to treat the world of the Revolution.

  But Kinnaird’s was a solitary path. His survival depended on his own luck and genius, but also on the trust of the few people he must have contact with. And their o
wn survival, in revolutionary France and confronted with an enemy of France, might lie on a very different path.

  Lavalier had got thus far in her reflections when there was a knock at the front door: a messenger, bringing a summons from Fouché.

  Keith Kinnaird sat anonymous in a crowded tavern, and imagined the room empty, and found a single figure filling his mind.

  He had learned that crowds were the best place to hide. He had come to recognize that one of his great strengths was his indistinction. This was the lesson of Sir Raphael Benjamin. Individuality was best preserved not in distinction, but in anonymity.

  So the fugitive Britisher knocked shoulders with dozens of Frenchmen who would have enjoyed his guillotining, and they did not see him.

  He didn’t see them either. He only saw Emma Lavalier.

  Now that he had come to recognize her extraordinary strength of character – her resilience – he had come to recognize her beauty. She was an organism perfectly adapted and adaptable to her environment, and he found this wonderful. She was human nature at its most magnificent, and this thrilled him.

  And might it be me that destroys her?

  He had to assume – and recent experience seemed to teach – that he was watched far more than he could realize. He had to assume that she – so glamorous, so notorious – was watched. He had to assume that, by one or both means, their contact was known. And it was not merely an incidental contact, such as her acquaintance with Benjamin or with Hal Greene before they became controversial; he had to assume that it was known that she had met him long after he was a publicly declared fugitive.

  She is guilty by association with me. She is tainted because she has touched me.

  Should he change his behaviour? Could he – could he somehow distance himself from her, so that she was freed of the association? It was too late.

  He had been declared a spy when he was not, and hunted accordingly. Now, it seemed, he was becoming one. He had striven to match his reputation to his real self. He had failed, and now he was changing himself to match his reputation.

  This change is no danger to me, because I was already hunted. But to those who know me? Those who are once seen with me?