Treason's Spring Read online

  Robert Wilton worked in a number of British Government Departments. He was advisor to the Prime Minister of Kosovo in the lead-up to the country’s independence, and is now helping to run an international mission in Albania. He’s also co-founder of The Ideas Partnership charity working with marginalized children in the Balkans. Treason’s Tide won the Historical Writers’ Association/Goldsboro Crown for best historical debut; in addition to his novels he writes on international intervention and translates a little poetry. He divides his time between Cornwall and the Balkans.

  Praise for Treason’s Tide:

  ‘A sparkling gem of a novel; not only a gripping espionage thriller that has the extra thrill of being grounded in genuine history, but a beautiful, lyrical novel alive with the sheer joy of language... Not since Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has a novel been so drenched in a sense of time and place’ M. C. Scott

  ‘Brilliant invention, the ideal vehicle for a narrative revealing hidden conspiracies behind one of the turning points in British history... a compelling thriller’ Sunday Times

  ‘Robert Wilton. . . has discovered a fresh vein of literary gold with this dense, superbly satisfying novel. . . beautifully written, wonderfully clever, this is another triumph’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘Bernard Cornwell meets Ken Follett in a Southwark pub and someone gets coshed. That is to say, great, intelligent, fun’ Time Out

  Praise for Traitor’s Field:

  ‘Brilliantly written, Traitor’s Field brings the sense of melancholy and paranoia – as well as a page-turning plot – familiar to fans of classic spy fiction’ Birmingham Post

  ‘Sets a new benchmark for the literary historical thriller’ M. C. Scott

  ‘A thoroughly satisfying read... it is done so well that one feels no resentment about being tricked’ Historical Novels Review

  ‘A wonderful sense mystery’ Falcata Times

  Praise for The Spider of Sarajevo:

  ‘A learned, beautifully written, elegant spy thriller.’ The Times

  ‘Robert Wilton is one of the smartest novelists we have. A touch of Conrad, more than a dash of Buchan... and a daring prose style that can set you blinking and thinking. Simply brilliant.’ John Lawton

  ‘Wilton captures a sense of place and time with immense vigour... This is a dense, rewarding beast of a book which makes sense of a tumultuous and critical few months in our history.’ Antonia Senior, The Times Books of the Year

  ‘[A] very rewarding work of historical spy fiction... intelligent and interesting’ Nick Rennison, BBC History

  ‘Fascinating history, exciting narrative and a wonderfully gripping (true) yarn.’ The Bookbag

  ‘A fast-paced and fascinating tale which draws the reader into the pre-war spying world. . . an excellent read’ Lovereading

  ‘Bringing this kind of novel to light takes writing skill, and knowledge of how states function (including secret services), of international relations, of the history of Europe. . . Above all, it takes knowledge, love and respect for the Albanians and their culture.’ Daut Dauti, Telegrafi

  ‘This is very much a literary thriller with a highly intricate and exciting plot. . . a brilliant work of fiction. . . Highly recommended.’ Promoting Crime Fiction

  Also by Robert Wilton

  Treason’s Tide

  Traitor’s Field

  The Spider of Sarajevo

  Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2017 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Robert Wilton, 2017

  The moral right of Robert Wilton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78239 195 1

  E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 197 5

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  For the history teachers of

  Stoke Brunswick School,

  Whitgift School and

  Christ Church, Oxford

  The inaccuracies, as ever, are mine;

  the inspiration remains theirs.

  Introduction

  In the Travellers Club in Pall Mall, the bannister rail has the remains of the primitive stair-lift used to hoist the increasingly vast Talleyrand up to the first floor for his luncheon. It reminds us that, after his decades of service to a king, a revolution and an emperor, the legendary French diplomatist found the genteel society of London far more congenial than his own country. (And the fast footwork that had kept him alive through such changes of affiliation was becoming rather harder, especially after luncheon.)

  Such were the games of allegiance, played across Europe and three decades. They first became tangled back when Talleyrand was enjoying an earlier sojourn in London, in 1792. The French Revolution controlled but had not executed Louis XVI; France was at war, and Talleyrand was sent to keep the British out of it. Loyalties were blurred and shifting, at a time when British radicals were basking in the new dawn of the Revolution, and French aristocrats and priests were fleeing for their lives in the other direction, and the European nations were trying to decide whether the blood on the cobblestones of Paris and a dozen other cities was a terrifying threat to their own social order or a handy weakening of the French.

  The secret archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, discovered a few years ago under the Ministry of Defence in London, exposes the intrigue and violence in the shadows of the guillotine in 1792, as the Revolution began to break into factions, and the European powers schemed for advantage and watched in shock as their security and their traditions of secret diplomacy were exploded. It illuminates the uncomfortable cohabitation between royalty and revolution in the autumn of 1792; a fraught, feverish phase when it was clear there was a new France, but not clear whether or not there was room in it for the old king; when the revolutionaries were feeling their way towards an understanding of what their revolution would be like; and when, during the first battles between this France and her neighbours, Europe was coming to terms with a new world.

  This phase – of pitched battles and backstair intrigues, of idealists and adventurers and spies, of desperate national and personal manoeuvring, plots and gambles and treacheries – is the landscape of Treason’s Spring. Drawing as usual on the archive of the Comptrollerate-General, it gives a new prominence to two remarkable footnotes in the story of the chaos that was Paris: the spectacular robbery at the Garde-Meuble, and the affair of the Armoire de Fer – a discovery that at the time gripped Europe. These two events are a matter of historical record, but the record had until now not shown what was really behind and between them.

  Within the centuries covered by the Comptrollerate-General archive, there are as far as I can tell documents spanning the whole revolutionary period. Some of the figures introduced in this volume reappear in the shadows surrounding Napoleon’s attempted invasion of Britain in 1805 (presented in Treason’
s Tide), and there are strands of this story that would only be resolved a generation later, on the field of Waterloo (due to be explored in Treason’s Flood).

  Intriguingly, the Comptrollerate-General seems to have acquired early or unusual drafts of certain significant memoirs that were subsequently published in more anodyne form. Thus for example we have here Mlle Pauline de Tourzel, a royal lady who escaped the Terror and whose published autobiography omits certain details of her adventures which are reproduced here in their unredacted form; and of course we have Talleyrand, European titan, with a perspective on the politics, and hints at his own desperate dance of loyalty, that the public record has never revealed.

  Treason’s Spring also introduces three of the most extraordinary and elusive figures in the history of European espionage: one a mercurial Briton; one a Prussian; and one a Frenchman whose second greatest triumph was to betray and outlive a series of men of much higher profile and repute, and whose greatest was his enduring anonymity.

  The strategic framework of events for this account is common knowledge. The detail is drawn directly from the archives of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, along with other relevant sources (specific documents are referenced with the SS prefix or equivalent; references are not given here for the many other documents that have contributed colour and background). The exact play of dialogue and emotion is of course my conjecture, consistent with the data and tending I hope to illuminate rather than distort what happened. If my fictionalization of these incidental elements inspires the reader to their own investigation of the facts, so much the better.

  This latest presentation of a narrative drawing on the Comptrollerate-General archive has been written in diverse places: in Cuba, and Canada, and Cornwall and odd corners between. But mostly it’s been written on my weekly commute between Tirana and Prishtina. So to the lads of Memi bus, and the fellow passengers who have tolerated my laptop jostling their infants and bags of peppers, thanks always for the ride, and rrugë të mbarë.

  R.J.W., February 2016

  A list of persons prominent in this section of the archive and active in Paris in autumn 1792, who are also the subject of individual files

  The French

  Georges Danton, Minister of Justice

  Jean-Marie Roland, Minister of the Interior

  Marie-Jeanne ‘Manon’ Roland, his wife

  Joseph Fouché, member of the National Convention and on the staff of the Ministry of the Interior

  Saint-Jean Guilbert, seconded to the service of M. Fouché and the ministry

  Madame Emma Lavalier

  Mademoiselle Lucie Gérard

  Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, natural philosopher

  Mademoiselle Pauline de Tourzel

  The Comte and Mademoiselle de Charette

  Madame Emilie Violet, seamstress

  François Gamain, locksmith

  The Foreigners

  Sir Raphael Benjamin, Bt.

  Edward Pinsent, Esq.

  Henry Greene

  Keith Kinnaird

  Hauptberater Karl Arnim, retinue of His Serene Highness the Duke of Brunswick

  Pieter Marinus of Delft

  Jonathan Murad, on commission from the Congress of the United States of America

  Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme

  – after Lavoisier, on combustion

  Prologue

  The Machine

  My dear Kinny,

  out of your darkness he brought you forth into light – was that not the line the old hypocrite Simms used to spout at us rascals? –and may his precious God have granted him heaven for hope rather than wisdom. And if I have so surely found the darkness here in France, damn me if I don’t secure an equal measure of light.

  They’re a peevish and miserable sort, these rebels, but –Kinny! – it is a very paradise for a man with an eye for the deal. Their revolution has set every man at the other’s throat, and left none to provide a musket or a mouthful of broth but your own Greene. I am in with all the sides in the district – you know me for the most credible rogue there ever was – and come and go as I please and all will buy or sell with me even when with none else.

  I need you, Kinny. I need your cold head for the figures, I need your eye for a false man and a true coin, and, so help me,I need your sour visage scowling and preaching at me for it would do me good to see you and I love you for the one honest man in Europe. So stir yourself out of whatever squalid shack you inhabit, and get you to Saint-Denis. At the Tambour they know me.

  And believe me as ever,

  unfaithfully yours,

  H. Greene

  [SS K/1/1]

  And Keith Kinnaird had kept the letter with him all the way from Edinburgh, down the coast and across to France; kept it with certain other documents, in an oilcloth wrap in an inside pocket, as if in its physical presence, in the re-perusal of its words, he could capture a more faithful Henry Greene.

  But at the Tambour in St-Denis, the rain beating its tattoo on the drum that swung over the door, they knew no more of Greene than to mumble a direction and check that Kinnaird wasn’t pinching the spoons. Greene’s rooms were easily found, and Greene had clearly been living there: a patched coat, a wretched sketch of Holyrood, and a variety of books intermittently missing pages that had been called to greater service in the fire or the privy, were as unmistakable an identification as the man’s face would have been. But the man was absent, and the landlord was vague about days and ignorant of where he might have gone.

  Henry Greene had vanished, and all that was left of his mind and intentions was in that letter; and to Kinnaird, alone and rather foolish, having come to the end of his journey and found himself nowhere, the letter seemed less substantial than ever.

  The Place du Carrousel is a pool of mud, swirled with the shit of horses and dogs and humans under thousands of feet, as they shift and try to shuffle forwards. Towards the centre of the square the bodies are packed tight. Hands clench and unclench in reaction to the spectacle, clutch at arms, hover over mouths as if to stifle vomit or a scream, grope, or reach for a pocket. The faces bob and strain for the view, exultant – and alarmed by what their exultation has conjured. There’s only a memory of light in the evening sky, and the windows of the buildings around the square twinkle orange in the blaze of the torches.

  At the exact centre of the crowd is the machine. The crowd is all movement and uncertainty, emotion and noise. The machine rises erect and exact, a thing of calculation and design, legislation and craftsmanship. At the summit of the machine, high over the faces, metal gleams in the torchlight.

  A single shout, and for an instant Europe is silent and holding its breath and watching.

  A flash and a thump – and did anyone actually see the movement? – and a great sigh rises out of the belly of the crowd. And the faces stare and gasp and cheer, and look uneasily at each other to measure their emotions; it is not an age, it is not a place, to be the one standing out from the crowd.

  Two foreigners watched from a first-floor window, standing instinctively back from the glass. Even behind the glass, even back from it, their voices were murmurs.

  ‘Don’t seem poor Colly’ll be much use to us now, Raph.’

  ‘Leastways he won’t peach.’

  A glance. ‘You ain’t that cold.’

  ‘Quite the contrary.’

  ‘You . . . ’ – incredulous – ‘you worried, Raph?’

  A smile, without warmth. ‘The world just changed, d’you see, Ned?’ The elegant Englishman gazed out into the chaos, to the ridiculous torso of Louis Collenot d’Angremont, confidential agent for the King, executioners approaching it uneasily as if they too felt the change. ‘Like some great weight dropped in the eternal clock.’ Near the machine, its second political victim was being dragged down from a cart, white-faced and staring. ‘The game is now quite new.’

  1

  Blood on the Cobbles

  IN WHICH THE ARRIVAL OF A STRANGER IN
PARIS IS NOTED BY DIVERS PARTIES, M. FOUCHÉ BEGINS TO DEVELOP HIS RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ADMINISTRATION, TWO ENGLISHMEN UNDERGO CERTAIN REMARKABLE ADVENTURES, AND A CRIMINAL OUTRAGE STRIKES THE CAPITAL

  The Memoirs of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

  (extract from unpublished annex)

  My mission of diplomacy in England proceeded with the stately torpor of one of their puddings through the bowel. When they tired of their efforts to tempt me to indiscretions political, financial, or amorous, my hosts in London would beg me for enlightenment about what was happening in France. They would gather around me, like savages before an oracle, and if they didn’t slaughter anything or offer much gold at least I got a satisfactory supper or two out of them. In truth, they were as bewildered and shocked by events in Paris as their primitive ancestors were by the eclipse.

  I tried to explain that to comprehend the secret dealings of that feverish epoch in France – to comprehend, indeed, how a man such as myself, a prince, a bishop, a diplomatist, could be the counsellor and chief envoy of three Kings, one Emperor and the Revolution – it was essential first to comprehend the chaos. Or, I should say, for incomprehensibility was its very nature, it was essential first to accept the chaos. This, I fear, is not in the English character.

  In the summer of 1792, the chaos was France alone in Europe with an army untrained, unfed and unled – her generals fleeing France with the rest of the nobility – being invaded by Prussia. The Duke of Brunswick with forty thousand men had crossed the frontier into France on the 19. of August. The chaos was not only a new government but a new system of government. In August my erstwhile employer Louis – the Sixteenth of that name, Louis the almost-magnificent, Louis the ditherer, Louis the soi-disant man of the people (who had then so impertinently decided that theirs he was not) – had been ejected from the Palace of the Tuileries by the mob, and then arrested; but the revolutionary regime had not yet abolished the monarchy, and so Louis lingered, and already the revolutionaries were dividing against each other.