Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  The blank fear of the child in front of him – she was twenty or more, surely, but such a frail little mammal – did not give the impression that she knew what anything was any more.

  She said nothing. Didn’t move her head. In the dumbness of these creatures was their only defence. Some animal instinct, perhaps, had taught her that to say nothing diminished the chance of a provocative mistake.

  It hardly mattered that she was in contact with the British. Indeed, at times it had been a decided advantage. If this child was to play a minor and yet positive role in his operations, he needed to know whom else she knew and contacted. And if the British were to remain his rivals on this field, better that they operated through couriers whom Arnim controlled.

  And this girl – really, she was smaller than suppers he had eaten – he controlled. Her weaknesses had only made her more vulnerable to him, and so more useful.

  Arnim said: ‘You have been seen visiting the British, Kinnaird.’

  A faint adjustment around her eyes – as she tried to control her alarm, he fancied.

  ‘I visit many men, Monsieur.’

  ‘And you are expected to tell me, or tell my intermediary.’

  ‘I always answer any question, Monsieur.’

  Gods, it was wearying. Arnim could not contemplate anything so ghastly as having children of his own, but these games of dumbness would surely be typical. ‘That answer is not clever enough, girl.’

  Lucie Gérard gazed up at the Prussian. What does he want, this monster? What answer will satisfy? Normally he avoided meeting her.

  ‘You were not always as honest as you should have been about your dealings with the man Greene. And look what that got you. You said your contact with this Kinnaird was incidental, and yet you are visiting him in his hiding place. What is the objective of this man? What does he intend?’

  Lucie thought. Shrugged. ‘Survival,’ she said to the Prussian’s chest. ‘And he wants to understand what he is caught in.’

  She looked up. He doesn’t care for the answer. He was watching her, some mighty contemplation going on behind the vast face. He doesn’t care for any answer.

  His eyes grew, and the face loomed larger over her.

  Oh. He wants fear.

  She clutched her hands defensively across her breasts.

  Men.

  ‘How do messages reach him? Through you?’

  ‘Some. But not all.’

  ‘Delivered how?’

  ‘The ones I bring come to our house in St-Denis. Others I don’t know.’

  Arnim growled, over her head. ‘Of course.’ He rarely bothered looking at her unless he wanted particularly to intimidate. ‘That apothecary shop is become a second Amsterdam. Does Kinnaird visit himself?’

  ‘Not any more; not since he is hunted.’

  ‘Do the ministry still watch it?’

  ‘Sometimes. There is sometimes a man there. Maybe there are others but I don’t know them.’

  ‘Do they intervene? Do they check messages? Read letters?’

  ‘Sometimes. They are quite open.’

  ‘Very well. These are your instructions. In two hours a letter will arrive at the shop for your Kinnaird. You will then wait until you are sure there is a police agent there, and you will ask loudly if there are any messages for Kinnaird. When you hear that there is one, you will explain that you will return to collect it in a further hour, after you have completed other errands. However stupid the policeman, he will be prompted to act quickly. You will collect the letter as promised, and then you will destroy it. Do you understand?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Now go. Pray that I do not have cause to speak to you directly again.’

  She nodded more urgently, and saw that he was satisfied.

  Arnim considered her. It was not ideal to meet her directly, of course. Normally it was one of the many benefits of Marinus. But once or twice it was necessary, under carefully managed conditions, to remind her of her predicament. She could tell no one anything useful about him, and she could not lead anyone to him.

  She didn’t even want to look at him. She was trying unobtrusively to slip past him.

  His hand came up fast in front of her, palm open. It was as large as her head and filled her vision. She stared into it. ‘There is no disloyalty you can contrive that will affect me, little girl. If you wish, you may disobey me and not destroy the letter. You may tell your Kinnaird exactly what I have done.’ He suspected that she wouldn’t. The man Kinnaird would feel more fragile about her loyalty than Arnim. ‘That is the sophistication of my plan. You cannot know what I intend. You cannot imagine what I need from you.’

  Now she looked up into his face, and her eyes opened wide, and she shook her head. ‘No, Monsieur.’

  Men.

  Kinnaird kept the horse at a trot as he approached Chambourcy.

  In truth it was a day for lethargy, a thick-skied heavy-headed day; Hal Greene was in his mind. But so was anger. His first reaction to the news of Emma Lavalier’s death had been to mourn the futility of it; of the death, and of the changed life that had caused it. Now, though, he felt the world crowding in on him: before her death Lavalier had been summoned to the ministry, which meant that the police might be even closer to him; someone had been watching Marinus at the camp; London’s spies had found him and had plans for him. So the horse clopped brisk along the road.

  The Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey. What could he know of it? When so much was pretended to be true, what to make of something that pretended not to be true? He did not intend to be their puppet or their decoy. But their games might suit his own interest.

  The loss of Lavalier showed that it was no longer a world of romantic life; it was a shabbier world, a world of little calculations and transactions, and she had told him that he must make it his and thrive in it.

  The younger Kinnaird, intrigued and even excited by the promise of the Revolution, was a world away; the other side of death and chaos.

  On the outskirts of Chambourcy, he found the house that Pieter Marinus had named, in connection with Hal. A house standing on its own, small and pretty and well-kept. It seemed an unlikely thing, under the slab of a sky and against the landscape of threats.

  Lavalier had written that he must become part of the chaos. And for that he must recognize it for what it was. As he had sailed down the coast, he had dreamed of what the world of equality would mean for the nameless son of a dispossessed race who had had to make his own way in the world. And he had arrived to find that it meant an immediate and unending danger. The Revolution had betrayed its own promise of new order and rationality, and betrayed it savagely.

  He tied his horse to a tree, and walked up the path to the door.

  The Revolution was not the answer to his hopes of an unimpeded path in the world; it was yet another obstacle. And so among the murderers and spies he would have to find his way.

  As soon as the door opened he knew it all: the woman in front of him was so clearly a woman that Hal would have fallen in love with. Pretty and wide-eyed and demure, and big gallant Hal would instinctively have swept her up with his energy and charm; and steady and quiet, and strong in the bones of her cheeks and jaw, and restless world-weary Hal would have longed to find shelter here.

  ‘Your pardon, Madame. I think you are Madame Emilie Violet. My name is Kinnaird; I am a friend of Henry Greene.’

  The colour flushed in her cheeks, and after a moment she nodded and let him in.

  Kinnaird remembered an eldest daughter in Galashiels, and a widow of Berwick. Hal Greene; the most susceptible cynic there ever was.

  They sat in her parlour, as neat as the house itself; simple well-scrubbed prosperity. ‘Madame, I assume . . . I assume that you have heard the news of Hal – of Henry.’

  Her jaw clenched. ‘From the news-sheets. From the gossips.’

  ‘I express my sympathies, Madame; for that indignity on top of the loss.’

  She smiled. It was a woman’s
smile, not a girl’s: world-used and sensible. ‘Do you know, Monsieur Kinnaird, I think that he truly believed he would settle here?’

  ‘I believe he might have, Madame.’

  She shook her head. ‘But that never seemed likely, I’m afraid. I knew that one day – after a week, after a year – he would go and not return. A fall from a horse, a fight in a tavern, a policeman, or a woman.’ Again the smile. ‘I knew there had been other women. It was not a spirit to settle.’

  ‘You had been acquainted for long?’

  ‘For five months.’ She stared into Kinnaird. He realized that he was sitting where Hal would probably have sat. ‘I suspect that when he was younger he would poke with a stick the wasp’s nest.’ He smiled. ‘What was he like?’

  Bizarrely, Kinnaird found himself amusing her with stories of their earlier exploits as Hal would have done, and prompting with his honesty about Hal’s flaws the same maturity and care that the man himself had aroused.

  She knew nothing of his political activities.

  At the door, Kinnaird asked, ‘When he arrived that night, Madame, did Hal seem as normal; did he say anything to the contrary?’

  She shook her head. ‘Like a boy. Like a very tired boy.’ She looked into his eyes. ‘He was happy, Monsieur.’

  Kinnaird nodded. ‘And when he left the next morning, Madame, had he a particular objective?’

  ‘To meet a man, was all he would say.’ Kinnaird nodded. She had confirmed Marinus’s assertion: Hal Greene had passed the night, what seemed to have been his last, in this pretty house away from the world.

  ‘Pardon an indelicate question, Madame: are you . . . satisfactorily settled?’

  ‘I have a little money from my late husband, and I support myself comfortably as a seamstress.’ Margaret Mackay had part-owned a mill. The Quinn girl had had an annuity. Neither had had eyes as beautiful as this one. Oh, Hal: why did you not stay abed for once, and leave the world to its own devices?

  Instead, Hal Greene had ridden off to meet a British agent, and then to disappear from the world.

  Kinnaird kept the horse at a trot again as he headed back eastwards. The world was crowding in, and he needed to be alert to it and not lost in nostalgia. He went no nearer Paris than St-Denis, and no nearer the centre of St-Denis than the glade by the river.

  Once again he stood in the centre of the glade, and turned a slow circle. He tramped, head down and thoughtful, around it and through the undergrowth. He was looking for Hal Greene still, but the rustles in the undergrowth were foreign spies and encroaching National Guardsmen and lost royal documents.

  Hal had been here, but he had gone. Keith Kinnaird must look to himself.

  The real Hal Greene had eluded him again. All that was left was an unrecognizable corpse in a ministry cellar. But Kinnaird was beginning to perceive the journey it had taken to get there.

  Dear K,

  His Grace the D. of B. is with all his usual energy making preparations for his new assault, and now that the French are grown more complacent, so much the easier shall his assault be. While the agents of police do chase shadow-men and shadow-papers, a most substantial Prussian army becomes daily more substantial. Of your borrowed diamonds the most effective use is being made: the path of the army of our Prussian allies will be bought not won, for the French farmers are willing to sell provender, and prominent officials are willing to sell their disloyalty and idleness yet more cheaply. If you will open the gates of Paris, you will find us soon outside.

  I hope that you are well enough among your gypsy friends. If my travels take me across the Pont de Neuilly, perhaps you might sell me some ribbons, or sell me Paris!

  Brutus

  Another letter intercepted in St-Denis, and it seemed warm in Fouché’s fingers.

  The implication that the ministry – that he – was being successfully deceived burned. The allusion to shadow-men and shadow-papers: what did this mean for the locksmith, and the secret royal correspondence? Once again, the faint sick sense that he had been impetuous.

  And yet – this the more pleasing warmth – once again his control of information had served him well. There might be foreign attempts at deception – of course; of course there were foreign attempts at deception – but he was aware of them because he read what was not to be read; he knew what was not to be known. This gave him the advantage. They – Guilbert – need not sit waiting for the locksmith to drop from the heavens, nor wander Paris dreaming of documents. The wizard Kinnaird was the heart of it all, and following him would unlock the rest.

  A summons, called snappish through the open door to the corridor. Guilbert, to be found immediately. He felt a pang for his documents. But Brunswick and the military threat to France should be the priority, naturally.

  This Kinnaird . . . He should review the dossier. This new transcription would need to be added to it.

  The dossier on Kinnaird was not where his hand sought it, where his mind led. A flicker of disruption in the smooth working of his mind.

  And then a memory, creeping in . . . The woman Lavalier. He had moved the folder when he had been convincing her where reason should rightly lead her. The folder would be in the pile on his desk.

  ‘Dear Fouché, how do you?’

  ‘Well, Minister. Well enough.’ Roland drifting uncertain in the doorway. Fouché’s fingers brushed the paper in front of him. ‘A new report, from one of my operations. The pre-eminence of the man Kinnaird is confirmed. British involvement in the theft of the royal jewels is confirmed. And they will buy the advance of the Prussian army.’

  Roland’s vague presence was immediately solidified: he gripped the door and his head came forwards and the voice sharpened. ‘But Fouché, this is surely new!’

  ‘A new synthesis, Minister.’

  ‘The Prussian army – that’s . . . that’s a matter of the safety of the Revolution. This is no longer an affair of individuals, of conspiracies. No longer mere speculations.’ Fouché felt his irritation rasping in him. ‘This is national strategy. National survival, Fouché.’

  ‘Indeed, Minister. For that reason I am devoting all of our efforts to counter the enemy arrangements. Thanks to my arrangements, we now know where the man Kinnaird is. He will be hunted, and destroyed, and the British and Prussian schemes will be blocked.’

  Roland was drifting again, distressed. ‘The Prussian army . . . ’

  ‘The Prussian army, if it crosses our borders again, is the affair of General Dumouriez and our soldiers. We have to give the Ministry of War something to do.’

  ‘All of our efforts, Fouché. No distractions.’

  Fists clenched over the paper. ‘There are no distractions, Minister. Everything is connected. In my mind, at least.’

  On the morning of 19th November, Jean the Dog found that a departing customer – he presumed it had been a customer; he had seen nothing – had slipped a folded paper among his tools. It was a note, enclosing another folded paper. The note read, ‘If you do not have a British neighbour, do not give him this.’

  Kinnaird got both the cover note and the enclosure, Jean wanting as little to do with the affair as possible.

  Kinnaird liked the style. Deniability; discretion.

  This, then, is how the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey does business.

  The enclosure was more impressive. A hint. A possibility. The Comptrollerate-General was close on the track of its trove of European secrets.

  I am still on a journey through a forest. I must follow the paths that open to me.

  He would set off immediately. His neighbours would lend him the necessary tools for a disguise.

  No name at the top, no name at the bottom, and little in the middle to implicate anyone. Deniability. Discretion.

  But now he’d have to stick his neck out.

  10TH OCTOBER, 1792

  Workshops of the Olympeans

  The Revolutionary authorities are finding it hard to get credit, one of the misfortunes of men given explicitly
to upheaval being that it is hard to give reassurance to men who prize predictability. Yet they find ways enough to force finance. And the necessities of their war and their administration are, by some immutable law of nature, obliging the manufactures of essential goods to work as hard as ever and to trust to providence and General Dumouriez for their eventual reward.

  Thus, although some of the artisans do suffer – the cutlers gone to bayonet-making or the wall, the turners of fine furniture turned to making rough benches for the spectators at the tribunals – industry is hale enough, if it can make itself useful. The great cotton house at Jouy prints fewer fine cloths for the ladies, but has plenty of soldiers to clothe. The regime is a great engine of administration, and the paper-makers must supply the fuel for it.

  Most of all, those who supply the fuel for the revolutionary war do thrive and must daily contrive new improvements to increase their productivity. Thanks to the inspirations of the great Lavoisier, now out of favour and position and hoping that his services to the revolutionaries’ muskets do overcompensate for his former exactions on their pockets, the production of saltpeter has left forever the farm shed and taken residence in vast new premises that produce the stuff on a gargantuan scale. Every road out of Paris now has a saltpeter factory on it, and Lavoisier’s new process has multiplied the output.

  The newest is at Joinville, and the building was not yet quite complete before it was functional in its essentials and turning out its incendiary powder by the cartload. It is a mighty edifice, a forge such as Hephaestus must have used, in dimension and yield built for Titans. Its main chamber is the size of a church, and the alchemy that on the farm was practised in barrels here transpires in vast vats. The choleric fluid produced in the process comes out not in drips, but flows by an elaborate system of piping, and the further drying and crystallizing of the saltpeter occurs on a like scale.