Petty Treason

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “I’m sure Marianne will like it,” Miss Tolerance said. She declared twenty-seven points.

  “‘Twill make it more convenient when she needs to ask a question about how things are being done.” Mrs. Brereton watched her niece from the corner of her eye. “You were right: she has a good sensible head upon her shoulders, and managed the house while I was sick, as well as keeping up with her callers. She deserves some sort of notice.”

  Miss Tolerance smiled with real pleasure. “I am delighted to hear you say it, Aunt. I think Marianne will be a great help to you.”

  “You might have been,” Mrs. Brereton said, with the air of one who expects to be scolded but cannot keep from making a remark.

  “I might have,” Miss Tolerance said mildly. “But my heart would not have been in it, and you and I should have quarreled.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Brereton, “we have had quite enough of that.” She laid down a set of four. “Match that!” she said with pleasure.

  The next morning Miss Tolerance saw the return of her belongings, and a few pieces of borrowed furniture, to the little house behind Mrs. Brereton’s. Despite the fresh whitewash there was still a smell of charred wood, an unpleasant acrid scent that pinched the nostrils and soured the throat. The house was very cold and damp; Miss Tolerance lit a fire and bustled about, putting things away, making note of what she would have to replace. Looking at her list she thought for a moment of Cumberland’s bribe, which would have bought her new furniture instead of used, with a nice nest egg remaining. She was sitting by the fire with some darning when Keefe brought a letter to her.

  The paper was heavy white laid stock, with her address written in a Continental fist tightly looped and back-slanted. The handwriting was unfamiliar to Miss Tolerance.

  “How did this come?” she asked.

  “A boy—a crossing-boy by the look of him—brought it. Didn’t wait for a reply, just took to his heels and run. Now you come to say it, miss, it don’t look like the sort of message normally received from a street urchin.”

  “Paper this fine usually requires livery and a senior footman,” Miss Tolerance agreed. “Perhaps someone prizes his anonymity too much to advertise the letter’s origin. And it may be new employment for me. Thank you, Keefe.”

  She waited until the servant was gone before she turned the letter over. It was double-sealed with red wax, without frank or stamp. If it was a new inquiry, why address it to her here instead of Tarsio’s? She shook her head: I really must let go my squeamishness about my privacy. She ran her fingernail under the wax blots, lifted them, and read the letter with astonishment. It was written in the same back-slanted hand, poorly spelled and altogether confounding:

  Dear Miss Tolerance

  I am sorry we could not continue our excelent coversation, but as you better than anyone else will be aware, circumstanses make it necesary that I remove myself from Londron for a time. I hope you were not too distresed by my absense when you called—but I hear that poor Beauville met you there and gave you some exerxise. You must not repine at having killed him. He was really a very useles man: not one thing that I set him to do did he do properly. The French will not miss him and nor will I.

  I supose you are congratulating yourself for your clevernes at having unraveled the whole busines. Indeed, you did very nicely to a point, but you must not expect to know the whole. Like you, I am a woman with my way to make, and like you, my goals change with my employers. I have done most, if not all, that I hoped to do, and can leave England with a light heart.

  And that I must now do, as Mr. Smith has been at my door these five minutes, and says the yaght must sail by the next tide.

  Please believe me that I remain your admiring friend,

  Camille Veronie Touvois

  Miss Tolerance’s hands trembled. She had the powerful impulse to throw one of her remaining pieces of crockery across the room. When the immediate impulse had passed she read the letter again, marveling at Madame Touvois’ nerve—although a far earthier term occurred to her. After several minutes in this uncomfortable state of admiration and rage Miss Tolerance asked herself why Camille Touvois had sent the note at all. What was its purpose? To thumb her nose at a bested adversary? Would someone bent on escaping English law stop to write such a note, the emotional equivalent of one nursery-child crying “Nyahh!” to another?

  Miss Tolerance read the letter again, putting aside her outrage and simply parsing the words. On this reading the import of the last paragraph struck her: “Mr. Smith has been at my door these five minutes, and says the yaght must sail by the next tide.”

  “You may call me Mr. Smith,” Cumberland’s aide had told her.

  Smith was a common enough name. That had been the point of the man’s transparent lie.

  So: were the Smith she had met and Madame Touvois’s Smith one and the same? Touvois hinted at it—else why add that last paragraph? If her Smith and Miss Tolerance’s were the same man, then Camille Touvois would be leaving the country under the Duke of Cumberland’s protection. But that could not be. Whatever his faults, the duke would not ally himself with the French—and in her first paragraph La Touvois had made it plain that she and Beauville had been in the pay of the French.

  Could Touvois have cozened the Duke of Cumberland into protecting her? Miss Tolerance wished that she had not left matters so badly with Sir Walter Mandif; she would have liked to show the letter to him and see what he made of it. She read the letter again.

  “No,” she murmured. Whatever she thought of Cumberland, he was not a stupid man. He would not have been tricked by some act of Camille Touvois’ into believing her a wronged innocent. Touvois’s name and the list of her crimes had been blazoned in the newspapers. If she were indeed under the duke’s protection—which the letter certainly implied—Miss Tolerance could imagine only two reasons for it. The first was blackmail. But what hold could Touvois have upon him? The Sellis matter, her first attempt to destroy Cumberland and his reputation, had been exploded by a Whig jury which had been sufficiently unbiased to acknowledge that the duke had not slain his valet.

  What else might be held over Prince Ernest’s head to compel him to protect Camille Touvois? A bastard child? Just another FitzHanover among the many. More florid sexual indiscretion? Possibly—but Cumberland had been rumored to have fathered a child on his youngest sister, the Princess Amelia: what worse could be said of him? Sodomy? Not impossible to believe, but to have survived this long with no whisper of it seemed unlikely. Brutality of the sort practiced by Etienne d’Aubigny? Mrs. Vose would have known that answer. Smith had said that matters had turned out very well for his master; that Mrs. Vose’s death cast Cumberland in a sympathetic light. A very convenient death, if it not only gained him sympathy but hid a brutal nature as well.

  Would Cumberland not hate Camille Touvois, who had constructed the plot to discredit him with Mrs. Vose’s death? Or would he perhaps have been grateful to her? Miss Tolerance read the second paragraph of the letter again: Like you, I am a woman with my way to make, and like you, my goals change with my employers.

  Miss Tolerance drew a breath.

  Could Camille Touvois be telling her, in so many words, that the French had indeed been her masters in arranging the Sellis affair, but that Cumberland himself had paid her to arrange the affaire Vose?

  Miss Tolerance rose and began to pace the length of the room, weighing obligation against risk. The answer she reached was always the same. Miss Tolerance looked about her and recalled that the box in which she had kept her pens, inkwell and paper had been destroyed in the fire. She threw on a shawl and crossed the garden to her aunt’s house to beg a sheet of paper and pen, and sat down at once to write.

  An hour later, after several false starts, she had completed a letter to the Prince of Wales. It was not entirely outrageous of her to write to Wales; she had met him at Versellion House, and Cumberland himself had told her that Wales not only remembered her, he had been impressed by her enterprise. Wales m
ight feel that the letter she proposed to send to him, detailing everything she knew and everything she conjectured about his brother Cumberland’s involvement with Camille Touvois and Josette Vose, was presumptuous. But she could not in good conscience keep treason a secret. She had promised that she would not make Cumberland’s secrets public; she had not said she would not tell the duke’s brother.

  I would not approach Your Highness with this matter but that I feel most strongly it has a bearing upon the security of the Nation.

  If Prince Ernest has indeed authored a plot to make himself sympathetic, the better to achieve backing for the War Support Bill or his own ambitions, he has done so at the cost of at least two lives. If my conjectures are wrong, I shall be glad of it. But I felt I must lay the whole before Your Highness, in hopes that whatever steps you think best should be taken. If Your Highness has need to speak further upon this matter, I am at your service. You have my earnest promise that I shall not speak of this matter except to yourself.

  Having finished the note, sanded and sealed it, Miss Tolerance took it across to Keefe and asked him to have it brought to Carlton House.

  “I’ll take the note myself, miss,” Keefe assured her. “I can use a bit of air.” Miss Tolerance, noting that it looked to snow soon, thanked Keefe very much. She returned to her cottage.

  Nothing, it seemed, had been what she thought it.

  She returned to the comfortable tasks of making her house a home again. She kept the fire in the grate burning steadily and rejoiced to feel the damp chill recede to the furthest corners of the downstairs room and then from the bedchamber upstairs. She brushed and hung her clothes, polished her boots—not with champagne, said to be the polish of choice among the wealthy, but with plain harness wax—and took out the bag of rags from which she hoped to fashion a new rug.

  Dusk found Miss Tolerance sitting by the fire, drinking tea and braiding rags, thinking of Anne d’Aubigny and wondering what the widow would find in India. She hoped the widow would make the most of her second chance; it was not a thing given to every troubled woman.

  Later Marianne rapped at Miss Tolerance’s door and was invited to take a glass of wine.

  “Not working tonight?” Miss Tolerance asked.

  “I’ve been working, well enough, but not on my back. I’ve been sitting with Mrs. B, looking over the ledgers.”

  Miss Tolerance cast her friend a look of purest astonishment. “The ledgers? As well to say you have been given the keys to Heaven!”

  Marianne laughed. “Felt like it, indeed. First, of course, I had to sit through half an hour’s rant upon why what she was going to show me must be kept a secret—from the patrons and the other girls and—”

  “From me? I don’t doubt it. I gave up my chance at the keys to Heaven, and I think I must have hurt my aunt a bit in doing so. But I am glad to see them going into your competent hands.”

  “So Mrs. B said. I should say thank you, but I imagine my privileges will be bought with a great deal of work, ciphering and writing and fretting. All this atop my regular responsibilities,” she added with an emphasis that made it plain she was quoting from her employer. “Yesterday I had employment and a following. Today, it appears, I have a career.”

  Miss Tolerance raised her glass. “To your career!”

  Marianne hesitated. “You are certain you don’t mind? You’re all the family Mrs. B has, and she would leave you the whole—”

  “What would I do with the whole? No, Marianne, I am delighted that my aunt has had the sense to do this. You will do a far better job than I would.”

  Marianne lifted her glass. “Then, to my career. And yours.”

  The wind wound around the house with a thin, cold wail. Marianne rose at last and said it was time she returned to the house. “I’ve a gent coming in a bit.” She picked up the garden-cloak in which she had made her journey across the garden and threw it over her shoulders. With her hand on the latch she turned her head to bid Miss Tolerance good night, and stopped.

  “There, and I haven’t given you this, which was my whole reason for being here!” she exclaimed. She slid her hand into a pocket of the cloak and took out an envelope. “This came for you. I’m that sorry I forgot it. The pleasure of your company, I expect.”

  Miss Tolerance saw her friend safe across the garden, then opened the letter. It was from Wales. He thanked her for the information she had shared with him and asked her to call at Carlton House at noon the next day to discuss the matter further.

  Royalty may be early or tardy, as it pleases. Commoners do well to be prompt. Miss Tolerance arrived at Carlton House at five minutes before noon the next morning, again wearing the steel-blue walking dress and her most demure bonnet. She was shown directly into a tidy little study, decorated in the Chinese style, with a good fire burning. She sat on a chair upholstered in red fabric embroidered with a profusion of yellow and blue birds, and looked around her with interest. The room had a chaotic elegance that was just short of being cluttered; there was a small sofa, three chairs, and several cabinets which held many Oriental curios.

  Within five minutes of her arrival the Prince was with her. His protuberant blue eyes were both affable and sharp as he raised her from her curtsy; his corsets creaked unmistakably. “You know far too much about my family’s dealings to stand upon ceremony, Miss Tolerance,” he said pleasantly. “Thank you for coming. May I ask you to tell me again the extraordinary information which you outlined in your letter?”

  Miss Tolerance did so. Wales interrupted from time to time to ask her to elaborate upon a point. He had clearly considered her information, and its sources, carefully.

  “There is no direct link between Madame Touvois and my brother?” he asked at last.

  “None but the letter, sir. Which I have brought to put into Your Highness’s keeping.” Miss Tolerance took Camille Touvois’ letter from her reticule and placed it upon the round inlaid table by her elbow. “The only true link is that which I forged in my own mind, and that I would reveal only to you.”

  Wales nodded. “Ernest is not stupid. He would not commit anything to writing. But this Frenchwoman, Madame Touvois—”

  “The letter? It appears to give credence to her role as a French spy. But I recall something Mr. Beauville said of her: that she delighted in causing mischief, particularly among the powerful.” Miss Tolerance smiled sourly. “I imagine her, cozily situated somewhere on the Continent with a very good deal of money from your brother and from the French as well, laughing at all.”

  “What am I to do, then, with my brother? This was a kind of treason. A plot against the process of law, certainly. And people died for it: that Beauville fellow, and the woman, my brother’s wh—mistress.” The prince looked at Miss Tolerance fixedly, his rheumy eyes shrewd. “I must ask a telling question, and trust that you will be honest with me, Miss Tolerance. You are certain my brother himself did not murder the woman?”

  “Yes, sir.” Miss Tolerance was pleased to reassure him. “Beauville told me as much before he drew his sword and forced me to defend myself.”

  Wales breathed a long, gusty sigh which smelt sweetly of cloves and snuff. “My brothers and I have shown an ample talent for tarnishing the reputation of the Crown without deliberately conniving at the matter. Miss Tolerance, you have all my thanks. I regret I cannot do anything more public—”

  Miss Tolerance shook her head. “That would not serve your purpose or mine, sir. I am happy to have been of service.”

  Wales took her hand and bowed over it. For a moment Miss Tolerance was afraid he would kiss it. He did not, but she was aware of the royal eye upon her, assessing her. He gave no more than a chaste regal salute, to Miss Tolerance’s relief. “If there is ever any way in which I may be of service to you, madam, I hope you will let me know.” He released her hand and tugged a square-cut emerald ring from his little finger. “I am quite in earnest; if you have need of my assistance, send this ring to me and I will understand.”

  Miss
Tolerance curtsied, murmured her thanks, and tucked the ring into her reticule. Like something from an opera! she thought. A handful of guineas would have been more useful, but she did not say so. She would never use the ring: a Fallen Woman does not summon royalty.

  “If you will excuse me now, Miss Tolerance? It appears I must have a talk with my brother Cumberland.” Wales smiled. “Although I can never be king, it seems I must still act the head of the family. Your pardon, madam, and again, all my thanks.”

  When Miss Tolerance rose from her curtsy the prince was gone. As she left the room a footman joined her to escort her from the house, and at the doorstep she found a hackney carriage had been summoned for her.

  “Miss, His Highness desired I give you this,” the footman said. This was a leather purse, gratifyingly heavy. As the carriage pulled away from the curb, Miss Tolerance opened it just far enough to disclose the cheering glint of gold. These coins, at least, she need not scruple to accept. She gave the driver Tarsio’s address.

  Miss Tolerance ordered a bottle of burgundy and the newspapers and sat in the Ladies’ Salon. The whole of Anne d’Aubigny’s case, from the death of her husband to her detention at Cold Bath Fields Prison, to her triumphant vindication, was recapitulated over several weeks’ issues. The more conservative the paper, the worse Anne d’Aubigny’s supposed crime was painted at the outset, the more fervent the outcry against the godless French when the “treasonous plot” was exposed. The Times, in particular, which had early on suggested that Mrs. d’Aubigny was “the most horrid and unnatural of criminals, a woman who slays her rightful master,” did an about-face that was almost dizzying. With Beauville dead and Camille Touvois named as the author of the treasonous plot, Mrs. d’Aubigny now figured as “the gently reared and much-abused relict of a man who early sought to warn this Nation of French perfidy, and paid the ultimate price in horrid murder!”