Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  Guilbert was already moving and in an instant he was driving into Marinus, hand to collar and knife up. A roar of pain, from Arnim, and the valley of the Marne echoed to it, and Kinnaird knew this heartbeat had to be his. With Guilbert still entwined with Marinus, and every other eye on Arnim’s pain, Kinnaird took half a dozen thumping steps and scrambled up the side of the cart, hands on its side and feet scrabbling at the wheel as it continued to turn. Then he was over and wallowing through the dung, pulling himself up onto the other side of the cart and reaching for the parapet and swinging himself up onto it with feet kicking against the bricks and then he was over and staggering upright and running hard for the trees.

  In the yard, Guilbert was yelling orders and policemen were running. Still on his knees, the locksmith Gamain watched uncomprehending the chaos of noise and running men, and bent to gather his tools to safety.

  The body of Pieter Marinus dropped tired to the bricks. Arnim, face ghastly, watched it drop. And then he dragged his head around and strode for his horse. Marinus’s eyelids flickered, tried to understand the distant green, and the sun, and why they were supposed to be looking for someone, and then they closed.

  5

  Dawn

  IN WHICH WILL BE FOUND SOME ENDINGS AND SOME BEGINNINGS

  My dear Bellamy,

  the tone of our exchanges has always been most congenial, and this has been a charm to me. Your somewhat stony intellect, if I may so describe it, for its cool and hard and unpolished aspects, has proved an unexpectedly engaging prompt to my own suppler continental fancies. And though I have only a few years on you, you have borne most courteously my lamentable habit of talking de haut en bas, and most correctly my resilience in the face of your official entreaties. It is in the spirit of our exchanges that I condescend now to a brusquer tone than you will have heard from me ere now. Bluntly: I write seeking help, and offering advice.

  By divers sources, not all of them English, I have been immediately apprised of the latest calamity in Paris, and surely the greatest. This news may be death to several great men at least, and permanent exile for many more. I must avoid the former, and I fear that the latter may be my fate. In which case I am more dependent that ever on your good offices with your Government. Entreat of them, I beg you, to suffer my continued residence here, with the facade of the continued consideration of my embassy.I dare not risk a return to Paris at this moment (nor the dark corners of London should it become known that my mission is in vain). We shall serve each other well, by protecting each other’s indiscretions.

  And so to my advice to you, which might well be heard throughout your Government, but which is first of all offered to you personally, in gratitude for your unflinching courtesies to this old French tergivisateur. The tide turns, my friend. It is a new dawn, a spring the like of which has never been seen. A new age; a harder age. An age in which the mob must be counted a constant threat. An age in which only the coolest calculation of advantage may protect the established social order, and the interests of men of discernment, from chaos. The men who rule in Paris, they have seen this – so I now understand. I suspect that this will not save them from the chaos that they have created, but they may have taught a valuable lesson to stronger men who will come after them. A few others – most particularly, it seems from my correspondence, your errant compatriots in your former Atlantic colonies – they have seen it too.

  British society has not seen it. If your society does not see the danger to the established order, then it will be overwhelmed by disorder. Even if it does so fail, individual men of fortitude and flexibility may yet float on the waters to a new safety. I would advise you, my dear friend, to learn to swim.

  I yet remain,

  Yours faithfully,

  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Bishop

  [SS G/66/97]

  ‘I am advised to ask for you help, in the name of Master Philippe and the Lady Sybille.’

  Absurd thing to say. Kinnaird knew it. The landlord’s understandable stare at these words was like a punch in the face. It had been hours ago, but the smell of dung from the factory cart seemed to clutch at him. Behind him Kinnaird felt the screaming attention of everyone else in the place. There were no choices left.

  He was no horseman, and he’d galloped away like a madman from the chaos at the Desmarets saltpetre factory. He was barely clinging on to the horse, and he was trying to duck to avoid the trees and still the branches whipped at him. Face stinging and clothes wrenched and still the beast hurtled on, cleverer than he was at this speed, and he’d lost all control. When they’d come clear of the trees Kinnaird had recaptured sense, pulling the horse to a canter and then, as the next village came closer, to a trot. He had to seem calm, he had to be inconspicuous; but he was not calm, and the police and the National Guard were close behind him.

  The madness. Somehow Marinus had led the police to him at the gypsy camp; and then he had led the police to the saltpetre factory and to Marinus and now another decent man was dead.

  He had not dreamed the police could be so close on his trail; they had had him in their hand, and only chosen not to take him because they wanted him to lead them. And he had led them. And Marinus had died, and the police had the locksmith, and the greatest secrets in Europe were about to be revealed.

  In the village, the tavern. Down from the horse, a heart-pounding pose of calm, instructions to the ostler to stable the beast, in and ask for a room, order some wine sent up, and at the first moment of inattention away out the back door and through shadows to the trees. In the trees he took a breath, looked back at the tavern, and set off again, on foot now, the highlander’s jog-trot through the wood and to the next village. There he walked again, caught his breath, came into the inn-yard knowing it would be full of his hunters waiting for him, and it was a shock when they weren’t and again he forced calm and commanded another horse.

  The gypsy camp was lost to him. He had to assume that everywhere he had been was now lost to him. He didn’t seem to be followed, but what did he know of such things?

  He needed sanctuary, but he could not know where to find it.

  What was the point of it, anyway? His pose of new wisdom had been exploded in foolishness and death. He was more closely hunted than ever. The locksmith would reveal the royal correspondence to the police, and the one hope of the diplomatists was ruined, thanks in no small part to him. Hal Greene was still a corpse lying in the ministry cellar.

  He had one hope left, for his own survival at least. He must depend on what he had learned.

  The nonsensical Kinnaird dossier, willed to him by Lavalier, was full of administrative detail. Topographical details of places he was supposed to have stayed. Marginal references to reports by particular named junior officials. One report had happened to include the new appointment of one Trichet to a position in the prefecture of the new département of Eure, with its office in Évreux. A significant place, Évreux, in the history of French nobility and religion and scholarship; but the Forest of Évreux was renowned at this time for the bandits who sheltered there.

  Kinnaird remembered a Trichet. And so on the 18th a letter reporting this information had arrived at an inn in Vernon, for a young man staying there; a young man once reputed a lounger and a drunkard, but now of the most sober conduct. A young man who, at his lowest ebb, had been pulled out of the gutter by a mysterious foreigner, and talked away the night with him, and found a shared pain, and exchanged a promise to maintain discreet contact.

  The next morning the body of Trichet had been found in undergrowth on the edge of the Forest of Évreux. His hand still clutched his pistol, but he’d been unable to fire it before being slashed across the neck and stabbed to the heart by a sword.

  And Keith Kinnaird had received a reply from the young man, full of names and addresses. And so, today, in his crisis he had come to the tavern of the Noble Lady near Pontoise, whose landlord was a former tenant of one of the old families of France.

  ‘I am ad
vised to ask for you help, in the name of Master Philippe and the Lady Sybille.’ The landlord stared at him, and then over his shoulder to check that no one else was paying attention, and then he was hurrying Kinnaird through a door to his own quarters and locking it behind him.

  Once more, the royal palace of the Tuileries is the scene of a procession. There are uniforms, and muskets held erect, and the regular tramp of feet across the marble.

  Up the grand staircase, the enormous mirror still staring down in approval of the dignity of the proceeding, and the procession maintains its steady pace, and the precise arrangement of the persons within it.

  Corridor by corridor, indifferent both to the vestiges of grandeur that gleam and hang from walls and prominences and to the vestiges of skirmish smeared and gouged across the walls and floor, the procession continues left and right and tramp tramp tramp ahead. A procession is a mechanism, regulated and sure of itself, guided by an unseen consciousness.

  Pairs of doors swing open in front of it, and tramp tramp tramp, and doors swing open, and tramp tramp tramp, and now with due awe the procession is entering the royal apartments within the Tuileries.

  But there’s something awry, a discordance in the ceremony, a knocking fault in the mechanism. Amongst other things, only the four uniformed men can maintain a steady pace. The other men haven’t thought of this. Or, uncomfortably, they’ve only become aware that there’s a rhythm because their own steps are breaking it and then, guiltily and ineffectually, they’re trying to catch it.

  Tramp tramp and stumble-double-step and tramp.

  Two soldiers bracket the front of the procession.

  Two soldiers march at the rear. Neatness, protection, and the suggestion that no one from the procession may be allowed to drop behind or wander off.

  Second to last, two men in the recognized attire of new-made officials, coats fashionable but cheap and neck-stocks too tight, one from the Ministry of Justice and one from the Ministry of the Interior. It’s their first time in the Tuileries and they’re trying hard to be sombre, and they don’t quite know what’s going on but it’s fine to feel important.

  In front of them, the heart of the procession, because this is a matter of the security of the Revolution and the stability of the state: Minister of the Interior Roland, with cramped forced steps because it’s hard to walk easily in the bunched heart of a procession and because he’s teeth-fist-arse-clenchingly tight-wound. At his shoulder, former Minister of Justice Danton, feet striding wild and impatient and damn the rhythm because he’s trying to rediscover the Revolution and has the lurching sense that time is running out. For these men, each footstep is a heartbeat, a worry.

  At the head marches Fouché, aide to the Minister of the Interior, clean shirt and eyes bright. And at his side is another man, pale-faced and dressed for work and carrying a bag. It is the locksmith Gamain, the only one of the civilians to understand the rhythm of the mechanism, and the only man who knows where he’s going.

  These two are between the front pair of soldiers.

  Another door. Ivory white panels; the details and decoration in gold. This time the front pair of soldiers stops. It might actually be gold. The soldiers know – they all know, all France knows – that this door has never been opened from outside, and never been opened without permission from inside.

  Smears of dust have collected on the gold.

  The soldiers glance inwards. Fouché hesitates, unknowing. Roland and Danton have bunched up behind him; they’ve been through this door before, and it’s always trouble.

  Only the face of the locksmith is untroubled. Pale, intent, sure, he nods the way forwards.

  The holy of holies is opened at the command of a craftsman. This is the Revolution.

  20TH OCTOBER, 1792

  Revelations and Lamentations

  The Minister of the Interior found his locksmith, and the locksmith showed the Minister the secret closet within the royal apartments in the Tuileries, and within the secret closet was a substantial cache of royal correspondence. And all indications thus far suggest that the results will be as tumultuous as the hunters had hoped and as we had feared.

  I have this from more than one source connected to the authorities, and I could get most of it from the boy on the corner, for the Revolution – and in this we may perceive the triumphant Fouché, rather than his more wary minister – has elected to make a public spectacle of the development. This has two implications of the greatest moment. The first is the content of the correspondence. I need not rehearse the significance, and this has never been doubted. The only question had been whether in some unprecedented urge of prudence the King had had the documents destroyed, during two years of instability or during the last hours of his residence in the palace, with the mob at the gate and discovery certain. Alas, Louis ran true to form, for hesitation and dullness, his privy correspondence went unburned, and now the most private dealings of several European monarchies and dozens of prominent persons are made most public.

  The second implication comes from the prominence given to the episode by the revolutionary authorities. The hunt for the locksmith having been conducted in secret, and the opening of the cache tight-managed, they could have kept the existence and matter of the correspondence unpublic, and used it for influence and pressure, diplomatic and individual. Instead they are clearly resolved to make a show of it, to shame the monarchies of Europe that have challenged the Revolution, and most of all to shame Louis. For the monarchies this may herald some discomfort; for Louis it may herald destruction.

  The cache was broken open this morning, with Minister Roland himself present. It is reported that the cache was in point of fact an iron cupboard, concealed within a wooden compartment, hidden behind a panel in the royal apartments and all protected by the most elegant conformity of decoration with the rest of the apartments and by the most cunning of locks. In conjecturing the existence of the cache, and then in recognizing the significance of the craftsman who had installed it, and then in identifying and locating the craftsman, and thus in revealing France’s greatest secrets with the turning of a single spring, the Revolution showed great perspicacity, and an unusual instinct for intricate skill rather than brute force.

  The documents, close-guarded, have been carried to some fastness in the Ministry of the Interior, where they may be perused and their contents used as their new possessors may wish. And truly, at the minute of the opening, some great hourglass turned and the sands are running for courts and great men across Europe. All this for want of a tinder-box and a moment’s resolve.

  The Ministry will I trust excuse my incontinent use of the express channel of communication, for I judge that the importance and implications of this development so merit.

  E. E.

  [SS F/24/153 (DECYPHERED)]

  The Kinnaird dossier – the mad collection of coincidences, half-truths, and wild products of Sir Raphael Benjamin’s imagination that Lavalier had brought out of Fouché’s lair – has shown him this place.

  The dossier is an encyclopaedia of counter-revolutionary activity. More importantly, it is a gazeteer of it. The places Kinnaird has really been that happened to have royalist connections; the places Benjamin had been or heard of and knew to have such connections, and where he has accordingly placed Kinnaird in his confected documents. All illuminated by Fouché’s marginal notes commenting on suspicious elements linked to such places and people.

  Accordingly, Kinnaird’s documented association with the establishment of Pelletier in the rue Honoré is nonsense.

  Except now it won’t be.

  He assumes that to Benjamin’s mind the association would have seemed spicier if it was based on something vaguely true about Pelletier.

  Nonetheless he must grip, and fast.

  ‘Good day to you, sir. My name is Kinnaird, and I have two things to say to you. Firstly, you are suspected by the Ministry of the Interior of harbouring escaped prisoners, passing royalist messages and supplying suspicious pers
ons with goods on generous terms. If that’s true I strongly urge you to find a way to disprove it or fly. Secondly, noting that – whatever the truth is about either of us – I am obviously sympathetic to you, and that I seem to know enough about you, I would be much obliged by your help this night.’

  It’s a risk, revealing himself like this in Paris. He has to trust to Pelletier’s sympathy or his fear.

  Either way, Kinnaird has connected himself to this place now.

  Bizarrely, he is proving the insane dossier true.

  Lots of things have kept Saint-Jean Guilbert alive: amongst others luck, a strong stomach, a discriminating taste in whores, a complete indifference to dignity and honour and thus the willingness to hide in a dung heap and stab a man in the back if it’s faster than the front, the refusal to gamble or drink too much, and a knife or pistol about him at all times; preferably both.

  And silence. Guilbert does not speak except when he needs to. Words are dangerous, and he doesn’t trust them.

  The Monsieur’s face shows that it’s one of those times. Fouché is stamping up the corridor like an angry five-year-old, and his face is the most extraordinary colour. Even a man who didn’t know him as Guilbert does would see that he is steaming furious.

  Fouché’s been getting gradually more powerful – and after the discovery in the palace he has got dramatically more powerful. Guilbert tracks such changes – it’s another one of the things that keeps him alive. Fouché’s anger gets people demoted, dismissed, sent to the war. Right now, Guilbert thinks, given that face the anger could get a man struck by lightning.

  By the time Fouché reaches him, Guilbert is standing alert, face buried in a courteous bow. Fouché leads him into the office without breaking stride.

  The two men finally look at each other properly when Fouché turns and sits at his desk. The smile on his face is terrifying. The eyes are mad bright, and the smile is a rigid contortion of his muscles, a distorted thing; Guilbert’s only seen such a thing on the corpse of the Englishman that he found in the house of the servant Bonfils.