Treason's Spring

by Robert Wilton

  ‘And the authorizations for transit?’

  Fouché hesitates, then reaches into his coat and pulls out two papers. Kinnaird takes them, a glance at Fouché’s face and otherwise watching Guilbert. ‘Thank you. I have people who will ensure the body reaches the coast safely.’ He steps back. ‘You, see, Monsieur, our game is only beginning. I plan to stay in France a while. I have work to do here.’ Fouché’s eyes widen. And out of his confusion and frustration comes a determination, and he smiles Kinnaird’s cold smile. ‘Now, Arnim doesn’t have your jewel, I’m afraid. But he does have fifteen thousand livres. One third I’ll need for my expenses, for France is hellish pricey for a fugitive. One third he keeps: call it professional courtesy, Mr Arnim. And one third, Messieurs, you may take; call it payment for your inconvenience this evening.’

  Arnim is watchful, trying to decypher Kinnaird. ‘Their inconvenience?’ he says.

  One of the two pistols swings to Arnim. ‘If you please. Frankly I’m interested to see if one of them cuts the other’s throat. Whatever happens, the story that two servants of the state took payment from a Prussian and a British spy will serve me handily.’

  Arnim places the lantern on the ground. Now all of their faces glow satanic from the light at their feet. He pulls a wad of assignat notes from inside his coat. The distance between him and the Frenchmen is three paces. He takes an approximate third of the wad, and steps forwards two paces. He holds out the money – between them; watching their faces.

  Fouché hesitates. Guilbert doesn’t, not for more than the second it takes to register Fouché’s uncertainty, and then he’s snatched the money and it disappears from the lantern-light.

  ‘Don’t worry, Fouché,’ Kinnaird says, taking his third from Arnim. ‘Reckon he’ll work out during the journey that he’s no alternative but to split it with you.’

  ‘Journey?’

  ‘Oh aye, it’s back to Paris for you. I’m no assassin, and no kidnapper. I’ve got all I wanted: the body of a friend, who deserves better than a pauper’s grave in Paris, and the chance to look you in the eye.’ He steps closer. ‘I’ve seen you, Fouché, and I’ve measured you. And know this: I’ll be watching your every deceit; whatever you do with your Revolution, however high you rise, this is the face that will haunt you.’

  He steps back again. ‘I watched you coming: you’ve no policemen within five miles. Plenty of time for me to get away with old Hal. And I checked you’ve no weapons in your cart. I don’t want to shoot you, gentlemen, but if I see you again tonight I will.’

  Arnim takes a step forwards, and reaches down and pulls the wine bottle out of Guilbert’s pocket. He takes a swig. ‘A toast for a man who would have appreciated it.’ He takes another. ‘Anything more for them, Mr Kinnaird?’

  The faces turn to Kinnaird. He shakes his head. ‘A safe journey, gentlemen. Strange people abroad tonight.’

  The two Frenchmen hesitate, and Arnim steps forwards again still gripping the bottle and Guilbert snatches it instinctively.

  Arnim’s smile is deathly in the wild light. ‘Remember me, little man. Remember me at your last, because it will be I who has hunted you to your destruction.’

  Guilbert has no answer for the face. He contrives a shrug, and turns away. For a moment Fouché finds himself alone with his British and Prussian rivals, and then he hurries after.

  Now Kinnaird is watchful: of Arnim, of the darkness.

  Soon they hear the clumsy roll of the wheels, and then the cart looms into the lantern-light, but it’s turning, Guilbert at the reins and Fouché grim and uncomfortable beside him, and Arnim and Kinnaird watch it into the gloom again. They listen as its sound dwindles.

  Silence. The leaves again, a swirl in the gloom and then gone.

  Arnim and Kinnaird watch each other, Arnim impassive and gazing down at Kinnaird, watching him alert.

  Eventually, Arnim smiles.

  ‘That was bold,’ he says.

  ‘You would know.’ Kinnaird breathes out. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d respond to the letter.’

  ‘You do yourself an injustice, Mr Kinnaird. Your invitations are most intriguing.’ He glances down at the pistol. ‘You have me at a disadvantage still.’

  ‘That’s the idea. Now come; we haven’t much time.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I don’t give a damn where you go, and I don’t propose to tell you where I go. But our business isn’t done. Quickly – to my cart.’

  Kinnaird leaves Arnim standing on the ground, glowing in the glare of his lantern, while he himself climbs into the cart and squats beside the coffin. The lantern-light shows the coarseness of its planks. It shudders slightly with Kinnaird’s movement, and as the grass-munching horse strains at the shafts.

  ‘This extraordinary gambit,’ Arnim says, ‘just to recover the body of your friend.’

  ‘Not quite.’ Kinnaird glances down at his pistol, and up at Arnim, the vast head glowing in the darkness. ‘Mr Arnim, you’re a calculating man. I’m about to put down my pistol. It is my assertion that if you don’t use my temporary distraction for any foolishness, you will profit from it.’

  Arnim considers the dim figure looming over him. ‘You too are a calculating man, Mr Kinnaird. A fair trade, as you would say.’

  Kinnaird lays the pistol down beside him in the cart. He looks up quickly.

  Arnim’s face is impassive. Then he smiles.

  Kinnaird’s lip twists up, and he bends again and finds a hammer and chisel and begins to work at the coffin lid. The Frenchmen haven’t wasted many nails on it, and inside half a minute it’s wrenched up and aside. ‘Now hold the lantern higher.’ Arnim does so. ‘You see, I wrote a third letter. An anonymous source offering Fouché more documents if he would receive me in his ministry. He agreed. I visited, but at twelve of the clock last night, not midday. An acquaintance of mine, a man named Pinsent, gave me the idea. I carried documents, consistent with Fouché’s reply, and this satisfied the sentries.’ He’s rummaging in the coffin now. ‘Documents of my own preparation: rather misleading of course, for Fouché. Easy to get in; harder to get out.’

  He has something in his hand.

  ‘You see, Arnim, I spent an hour last night in Fouché’s cellar, in his trove of documents – the royal correspondence.’

  Arnim’s eyes widen in the light.

  ‘Would take a week just to catalogue the dossiers properly. But I had time enough to find a few essentials. A handful of dossiers, of particular concern to Britain. And I put them in here, under Hal’s body. Old Greene, in this cheap box, for all he ain’t turning into any nosegay, he’s the most precious thing in the whole of Europe. Fouché has just smuggled the best of his own secret correspondence out of his own ministry.’

  His hand comes forwards, and closer to the lantern a leather dossier is more clearly visible. Its skin seems to glisten yellow in the light.

  ‘My calculation, Arnim; and my trade. I’m no diplomatist, but I judge that the interests of our countries are becoming more closely aligned. Call it a . . . a down payment on future co-operation. Call it a debt that I might one day have to reclaim.’ Arnim’s hand closes on the dossier. ‘Less certain documents that I found of particular curiosity, this is the King’s secret file – Fouché’s secret file – on Prussia. Try not to lose it again, eh?’

  Arnim has put the lantern down on the edge of the cart, and now he has the folder two-handed. A glance inside, then he looks up at Kinnaird. And bows deeply.

  ‘A pleasure doing business with you, Mr Kinnaird,’ he says. ‘And it would be my pleasure to do so again.’

  ‘Aye, well, I’m sure we’ll both want to keep it to a minimum, but one never knows when one might need a friend in a foreign field.’

  ‘A friend in a foreign field,’ Arnim repeats. ‘A friend in a foreign field. I shall remember it, sir.’ He looks around them. ‘And now what?’

  ‘Now you skedaddle,’ Kinnaird says, ‘in any direction you choose as long as it’s not anywhere near me
and my cart.’

  The lantern goes out. ‘Perhaps I shall see you around Paris.’

  ‘I think we both rather hope not.’ Arnim chuckles in the dawn gloom. He bows again, and takes a step backwards, boots rustling in the leaves.

  ‘Arnim, there’s something else.’ Arnim stops, wary. ‘Fouché brought me information, and I’m hoping that you did too.’

  Silence.

  ‘I came to France to find my friend. The man here in this box. Eventually I found that he was dead. And I’ve been wondering who might have killed him.’

  Silence still.

  ‘There were so many men he might have crossed. He was playing games for the British government; so the French might cheerfully have killed him. But they’d more likely have made something public of it, and the way his body turned up – together with the death of the royal servant Bonfils – didn’t seem to involve them. I thought it very possible that one of the British might have done it: some silly little betrayal or other, some cynical game. But again, the way his body turned up drew attention very dramatically and deliberately to the British community, and so I couldn’t make that work either.’

  Arnim’s face is shadows, the greys and blues of dawn, and nothing shows that he is listening.

  ‘I fancy that you know, don’t you, Arnim?’

  Kinnaird waits.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You killed the servant Bonfils, didn’t you? To stop Fouché finding out whatever he knew.’

  ‘I killed the servant.’

  ‘And you – you and Marinus – you thought that it would be handy to add to the confusion; to shift attention onto the British. That was in your interests more than anyone’s. So you put Hal’s body into the servant’s house.’

  A pause. ‘We did.’

  ‘Which made it rather obvious that it must have been you who killed him. Poor Marinus mentioned that he’d been in St-Denis that day – the day I think Hal died.’

  Silence.

  ‘Except that you didn’t kill Hal, did you?’

  Still silence.

  ‘At that point you had no interest in killing a British agent: he was little threat to you, surely. More importantly, you had found a way to get the information he sometimes passed. So why take the risk of murder, drawing attention to yourself, perhaps drawing revenge from the British, and cutting off the flow of information?’

  Arnim is a hulk in the pale light.

  ‘And yet you knew he was dead and could lay your hands on his body. How was that possible? How was it possible, unless you or Marinus knew the murderer and knew the crime? You didn’t want Greene dead, but he was dead, and then for some reason it was in your interests to collude in the mystery of his disappearance.’

  Is Arnim smiling?

  ‘Why might that have been? Because this way you gained new power over the murderer. More importantly, it bought their silence. Her silence. It was her, wasn’t it? The last thing you wanted was her in front of the Tribunal telling all about Marinus, Marinus whom she passed information to, and about the terrifying foreigner she’d met once or twice. You’d forced her to work for you, to help you watch the foreigners of St-Denis. She was ideal, with all those messages coming to and fro her father’s shop. Marinus was coming to meet her that day, and he must have found her just after she’d killed Hal, and he helped her bury him in the undergrowth at the edge of that glade – I think I found the trace of it – and that’s how you knew where to dig him up again.’

  Arnim shifts. ‘It’s a splendid speculation, Mr Kinnaird.’ His face is still in shadow.

  ‘Lie number one: she claimed that Greene had broken their appointment that day – the 4th of September, if I’m right – but it’s clear from the timing that the message he wanted her to carry was a British request for the disruption of the meridian surveyor in St-Denis, and I know from the recipient that she passed that message. Lie number two: she can’t have seen Greene in the carriage, near the Garde-Meuble, that night of the theft of the royal jewels, because he was long dead.’ Kinnaird leans forwards. ‘It was you in the carriage, wasn’t it Arnim? She saw you. You weren’t robbing the Garde-Meuble yourself. But had someone promised you some of the loot? You were keeping an eye on your investment. By a most unfortunate coincidence you were seen, by one of the very few people in France who knew you for what you are. But you could force her to lie even to the Tribunal, because you knew her a murderess. She was instructed to name Greene instead; again, shift the attention from the Prussian to the British.’ A pause. ‘It must have been you, Arnim. And it must have been her.’

  Kinnaird’s voice drops. ‘Lucie Gérard. The girl Lucie killed Henry Greene, Arnim. Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kinnaird breathes out, a long sigh.

  Arnim turns away.

  ‘Arnim.’ Arnim stops. ‘One more thing. A point of curiosity, if I may. I understood that you carried a poison dose – in a ring. Tonight you came to the crisis. You weren’t tempted to use it?’

  Silence a moment. Arnim doesn’t turn around. ‘Oh but I did use it, Mr Kinnaird.’

  Joseph Fouché left Paris with a dead man in his cart, and he returns with another, Guilbert’s corpse slumped back beside him. He has had to watch violent death for the first time, to watch Guilbert’s brief confusion, the wine bottle still clutched in his hand, and his shock, and his contortions and his fear and one final moment of realization of how he has been hunted and destroyed.

  And it is only the first of Fouché’s disappointments, and the first flame of his anger.

  ‘Keith Kinnaird, I cry you the damndest, deviousest rogue north of the Forth!’

  ‘If you say so, Hal.’

  ‘Look at you! Gravedigger face. Quiet as a fucking rabbit. I swear at one point you looked like you were praying. They must have thought you the weediest little puritan in Scotland, and didn’t they think themselves smart?’

  ‘If you say so, Hal.’

  ‘Not so fucking smart now, are they?’

  ‘We didn’t actually lie to them or break a law, Hal.’

  ‘Course we didn’t! Not us. Not innocent Kinny! Not Saint Keith. That’ll teach’em. Couple of scheming Merseyside pimps thinking they can best Hal Greene in the trade. Reckon they’ll not try that again, will they?’

  ‘No, Hal. Might come for us anyhow, Hal.’

  ‘They’ll get their arms broken then.’

  ‘Might send them a little something anyway. Misunderstanding; professional courtesy. Keep them sweet.’

  ‘The hell . . . Whatever you think right, old lad.’

  ‘Yes, Hal.’

  ‘Kinny, you’re the devil. I mean to say, you might actually be. Old Nick himself, in last year’s coat and bright-polished boots.’

  ‘If you say so, Hal.’

  ‘George Rentoul’s talking about putting fifty guineas in. But he’s not the man for me, I reckon.’

  ‘Your decision, Hal, but you know I’ve always been cautious of spreading too – ’

  ‘You miss my point completely, you silly sod. Rentoul’s a good fellow and an old friend. Men like him – him, and Mackay and Ross – they’re the closest friends I have. All the sport a man could want, and Mackay has a cousin who may be the most gorgeous creature I’ve ever seen and I’m half determined to ruin myself over her. But I still think that of all men on earth, Kinny, the one I would depend on for anything, the one I would trust for my life, is you.’

  ‘If you say so, Hal.’

  Kinnaird, alone again, risked a moment longer staring down at the cloth-wrapped corpse of Hal Greene.

  Against his chest he still had the letter. ‘I need you, Kinny . . . ’

  Perhaps you did, Hal. But I wasn’t fast enough, and for that I am truly sorry.

  ‘If I have so surely found the darkness here in France, damn me if I don’t secure an equal measure of light.’

  Did you find it, Hal? It didn’t seem so: not for this rotting flesh, rude-buried and ruder-unburied, dragged in and out of Pari
s cellars, coarse-wrapped and boxed, and now out into the night on a cart.

  ‘ it is a very paradise . . .’ Perhaps it was after all. Hal Greene had lived and loved as he always had: wildly and completely. And at the last, his eyes had seen only a charming scene and a pretty girl. How ridiculous it was, that a man who’d risked death from the agents of three or four countries should be knocked on the head with a stone by a jealous young woman.

  Lie number three. Lucie’s insistence that Monsieur had always been so correct with her, so gentlemanly. The least credible thing of all. You’d dallied with her, hadn’t you, Hal? Of course you had, with all the instinct of a mob scenting blood. And that drowsy afternoon you said something that exploded the fairytales; she found out where you’d spent the night, and she understood that you truly loved, and it was a betrayal worse than any inflicted on France or Britain or Prussia these past weeks. And Lucie Gérard – Lucie of the horse and Lucie of the glade and Lucie of the forest, who was so wary of the world that she had found a way to live entirely in its gaps, who had dared just once to feel something full – Lucie would never be innocent again.

  A summer’s afternoon, and the scream of a passionate woman. Hal didn’t know or care about the mad games that had followed his death.

  But then Hal had never cared about anything – except, frequently and briefly, a woman. Hal Greene – and Raph Benjamin, and even Ned Pinsent – swaggering glorious around France, somehow oblivious to the dying of their world.

  ‘And believe me as ever, unfaithfully yours . . . ’

  What have you done to me, Hal? You died as you had lived, and a part of me envies the life and envies the death. For I am not you. Surely I am what Emma Lavalier and Lucie Gérard called me: an unremarkable thing.