Treason's Spring Read online

  [SS F/24/145 (DECYPHERED)]

  Fouché sharpened his quill with freakish speed, the blade flicking and clicking against the point back and forth in his vibrating wrist. A trick from school; a trick that reminded him of Guilbert’s with the knife. He wondered what that meant.

  Roland watched the performance uneasily. Fouché was useful. Fouché was odd. Fouché was not, somehow, controllable.

  They were in Fouché’s office. Fouché’s office: a small room adjacent to the minister’s, a mutual convenience – indeed, the size suggested that it might once have been a convenience – so that Roland didn’t have Fouché lurking at his shoulder all day and Fouché didn’t have to crouch like a schoolboy at another man’s desk. The proximity – a connecting door, and he could be in any meeting he liked, be with the minister in a moment – was essential. Thrilling, for Fouché. He felt he had learned one of the great lessons of government: titles are nothing; geography is everything.

  Roland was relieved. Fouché found himself pleased – dangerously comfortable, almost.

  The minimum furniture, and the simplest: wooden table; upholstery on Fouché’s chair because the clerks couldn’t believe he’d accept less; two plain chairs for visitors. Already the room was dominated by paper: a cupboard covered most of the end wall, including half of the window in the corner; already every space on the shelves was the beginning of a pile of documents. Already Fouché was worrying that it wouldn’t be enough.

  ‘You are content to manage this affair yourself, dear Fouché?’ It wasn’t really a question; a courtesy only. To Fouché’s hesitant suggestion Roland had immediately agreed.

  ‘With your permission, Minister.’

  ‘She is a . . . lady of renown.’

  Fouché didn’t know what that meant. He waited.

  Roland licked his lips. ‘Almost of . . . notoriety.’ Fouché still didn’t know what it meant, but he could make more of a guess. ‘A lady of contacts. In different parts of society.’

  Was Roland telling him to go carefully? ‘And, it seems, in parts of foreign society too, Minister.’

  ‘Indeed! Indeed. She gives . . . parties. And attends them. She has been once or twice to Madame Roland’s salon.’

  Fouché’s eyes narrowed. It was almost a useful insight from the Minister, at last. Roland’s young wife had made herself one of the pre-eminent hostesses of Paris. An invitation did not indicate any particular attitude of politics, but it did indicate significance. Social status, or money, or beauty, or brains, or influence.

  ‘I confess, Minister, that I was unfamiliar with the diversity of English people in Paris.’

  Roland was standing with his hands clasped in front of him. Now he opened them, as if demonstrating the size of the English community. ‘Oh indeed! Diplomatists – certainly until they closed the embassy last month – and engineers, and travellers, and gamblers, and fugitives; a few writers and physicians, though it’s more the other way, more French in England, if you follow.’

  ‘And adventurers and thieves, it seems.’

  ‘Mm. So it seems. It was smart paperwork of yours – drawing the links between them. This Greene, and so on.’

  ‘Will they have smuggled the royal jewels out of France already?’

  ‘Who can say? Perhaps it depends on whether they were . . . ah . . . official agents. Of the British Government. The British Admiralty has its spies. Their Home Office has its spies. And there were rumours . . . an older office – ancient – its name unknown.’

  It sounded mediaeval. Fouché was caught between reverence and irritation. He was conscious of moving into new territory, again.

  Roland said, with discomfort: ‘It is not yet illegal to be a foreigner in France. We have always been . . . most cosmopolitan.’

  Fouché nodded. ‘But no more Prussians, anyway.’

  ‘Ah . . . ’ – for a shrewd navigator of the fastest political currents, Roland could on occasion seem extremely old – ‘well now. Just one. Perhaps.’

  Fouché waited patiently.

  ‘When diplomatic relations with the Prussians were broken, their embassy was closed and all of their officers left – including the one with whom the government corresponded on matters of security, and the one we suspected of being responsible for Prussian espionage in this country. But it was always rumoured that there was another, greater man. Unattached to the embassy, and responsible for Berlin’s most secret dealings. At that time . . . ’ – the vagueness was left alone; everyone was too polite to mention that Roland had been the King’s last Minister of the Interior before becoming the Revolution’s first – ‘he was our greatest mystery. Our greatest concern. A Prussian master of intrigue, at work in France.’ Little smile. ‘I fear that our ignorance made more of him than was warranted.’

  ‘If he exists – now, of all times – he cannot be ignored.’

  Roland’s face opened in acknowledgement and impotence.

  ‘How may he be traced? How may he be captured?’

  ‘We tried to keep a few likely contacts watched. Not likely to achieve much.’ Roland shrugged, elaborate and slow. Detecting frustration, even on Fouché’s blank features, he added, ‘A challenge for you, perhaps.’

  Fouché said nothing, ignored the paternalism. There is more reading to be done.

  Suddenly Roland was moving towards the precious connecting door, chirping as he went. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to your interview, dear Fouché.’

  ‘Only if you’re sure I do not impose, Minister.’

  ‘Not at all! Not at all. Distinct advantage.’ He was halfway through the door. ‘Most helpful.’

  Fouché watched the door click shut.

  Why does Roland not want to be part of this?

  Faintly, uncomfortably, the sense that there were more of the fundamental rules of government yet to learn.

  ‘He’s cooked us, the bastard!’

  ‘My dear fellow – ’

  ‘Don’t fellow me, Benjamin: you tell me the devious bastard Greene hasn’t cooked us somehow.’

  Raphael Benjamin started to speak, to calm, and then hesitated; it did look as though Henry Greene had cooked them. ‘Not deliberately, surely.’

  ‘Really? Really?’ Ned Pinsent was hot, halfway drunk and striding in a necessarily small circuit of his room. ‘He disappears, drops off the world, not a word except to set us up in that lunatic mission to La Force – and now this!’

  ‘It wasn’t his doing we were on the spot.’

  ‘You sure of that, Raph?’

  ‘We heard rumour something was afoot at the – ’

  ‘Yes: rumour.’ Pinsent’s knee knocked the corner of the cupboard, and the words continued through the hiss of pain. ‘That bastard breathes rumour, don’t he?’

  He stopped striding a moment, and looked at Benjamin. They remembered where the rumour had come from. Pinsent set off again, now with direction. ‘I’ll fight any man, but I ain’t waiting to get hauled before the Tribunal.’

  ‘They’ve no other names. There’s no suggestion that we – ’

  Pinsent swung a box onto the table. ‘You’re brave, Raph, not stupid. Every ostler and bar wench for ten miles knows we’re comrades with him. Only wonder is the gendarmes haven’t kicked the door in already.’ He was looking around the room for things to put in the box, and now made for the cupboard. ‘I’m away.’

  ‘Not to England, surely Ned.’ Pinsent stopped. His shoulders slumped, and he turned. His face was hatred, and then it too slumped. ‘No, they still won’t have you, will they?’

  Pinsent turned away and opened the cupboard. ‘The provinces then. The coast. The Low Countries.’ He put two cups into the box. ‘Somewhere I’m not known.’

  ‘They’ve taken Emma in.’ Pinsent looked up, stunned. ‘Questions only, I guess.’

  Pinsent shook his head heavily. ‘Damn this . . .’ he said hoarse. The candlestick followed the two cups. ‘She’s well-known. And they’ve obviously found that Greene visited her.’ Another shake of the head
, another murmured curse. He stepped to the bed and tugged the counterpane off it.

  ‘We can’t leave her in their hands, Ned.’

  Pinsent’s head snapped round, the eyes more alarmed than before. ‘No, Raph. No.’ This time the head shook rapidly. ‘Duty to a lady, and you know how I – how I – admire her’ – Benjamin smiled very faintly – ‘but we’d just as well book our places on the guillotine right off. It would only confirm we were involv- And I’m not damn well involved!’ The counterpane went into the box. Pinsent made for the mantelpiece, reaching for the picture of the two girls.

  A knock at the door.

  They stared at the door, at each other, and back at the door as it knocked again.

  Benjamin stood, was behind the door in two steps and had the pistol in his hand and cocked. He nodded at Pinsent.

  Pinsent said, ‘Oui,’ with difficulty.

  The door opened. On Pinsent’s face Benjamin saw the apprehension and then, most puzzling, an eye-widening surprise.

  Emma Lavalier’s catalogue of revolutionaries:

  peasants; bull-like bankrupt innkeepers; broken-toothed street girls; vicious jumped-up clerks; poets; bullies; demagogues.

  Men of romantic grandeur; even greatness. Danton: the brilliant, the voracious, the dazzling. She knew some of them.

  The mob, fired by frustration and poverty and all the things that have always sent men with ill-formed anger and ill-formed dreams into the street.

  But never this. Immediately, in the eyes of the man in front of her, there is something different.

  Pale hair; pale face. The eyes . . . somehow opaque; their colour, their glance, hard to catch. A young man, surely; with an old man’s face.

  His eyes had travelled down her body, as she stood in front of him, and she relaxed a little and let her body swell with his gaze. Even revolutionaries preferred their innocence comely.

  Then his eyes came up again, and they were still so ghostly and so challenging and she began to fear.

  Fouché’s examination of her body had been instinctive. Like the glowing rolling contours of a classical statue, it invited the eyes. And like a classical statue, he knew it to be what men considered beautiful.

  But he noted this, rather than responding to it. And so his eyes came back up to her face again.

  Her face stopped him. It unsettled him.

  For Fouché, women’s faces have always been a blank: unreadable expressions from unimportant people – a mother, a maid. A mask, given to them by the adolescent expectations of men. But now, for the first time in his life, he wants something from a woman – he needs something – and he knows that a command won’t get it.

  What is this face thinking? What is this face thinking of me? For the first time, he must read a woman’s face. He must decypher it.

  The dark hair has started with poise, high on the head, but come awry a little. Strands of it hang loose around her exposed neck, the neck where the hollow of her throat is open and vulnerable. The features are . . . The lips are closed firm, and this makes them seem thinner than they clearly are. The nose is small but strong, and the suggestions of brows sweep up like swan necks from it. The eyes at last?

  She is not a young woman any more. But the face is still an exquisite thing – he remembers a lesson in the appreciation of the classical arts for boys too young to appreciate them – a fineness, a perfection of proportion in its elements. And colour: is it artifice or fear? Would applying a woman’s pastes denote masquerade or confidence or merely habit?

  Can one read quality in a face? Can one read guilt?

  The eyes again: the eyes are dark, wide. They do not shift from him. When he makes contact with them, she breaks it first – he feels her insecurity, and he enjoys it – but whenever he looks away and looks back they are fixed on him.

  She is watching me. She is reading me…

  Emma Lavalier has always been able to influence men, by physical presence alone. The subtle shifts of her body – a hem raised on a step, a thigh moving forwards, a full breath into her chest – distract and attract. The signs of vulnerability invite sympathy and desire: disarray of hair suggests a woman coming awake in her bed – it suggests the morning after and thus the night before; disarray of clothing suggests the violation that has happened or is about to. The hints of a loss of control – the wider eyes, the shorter breaths – imply weakness and invite an over-confident assumption of mastery.

  Everything that one can know of Emma Lavalier are the exterior qualities: the messages of surface that distract a man from her self. Within this costume of lace and flesh, behind this mask of emotions, Emma Lavalier is hidden and unknown.

  The exposed neck had been a careful calculation. Often a high collar suited her better – suited her height, and her face. Today, however, she needed to be vulnerable, not poised; and that meant the exposed neck.

  And yet . . . in the France of the machine, to expose one’s neck is the greatest vulnerability of all.

  Guilbert earlier, just an hour or so before, when Fouché had mentioned that he was going to be interrogating a woman: ‘And what does Monsieur know of her?’

  ‘Nothing, naturally.’ Thin smile. ‘Hence the interrogation.’

  No smile from Guilbert. ‘If Monsieur will give me more notice of these occasions, I will try to be of more service.’ And Fouché had shrugged, covering the vague but irritating sense of his own naivety.

  Within the hour, Fouché starting to fidget and watch the door more often as the interrogation came nearer, Guilbert had returned unbidden; Fouché wasn’t sure that he’d seen the door open and close.

  Guilbert brought a portrait of Madame Emma Lavalier, a tapestry made from fragments acquired in corners and shadows.

  Her age and family were not exact. Old Lavalier was a soldier who earned honour fighting the British in the Americas in the ’fifties, and a merchant who earned a bundle trading with them afterwards. So he could marry for lust rather than status, and did so. And then he’d hung around the court picking up duties here and there to maintain a bit of standing. Emma Lavalier had been an adolescent nobody, but beautiful. Twenty years younger than her husband, maybe thirty even, and she’s a Cleopatra now so what she was like then, Monsieur, just imagine! (Fouché could not imagine.) Old Lavalier had married this pearl, and then most conveniently died. Stories of course, Monsieur: all kinds of gossip about lovers – she was a generation younger than him, and he was a bit of a fool despite his gold and she’d dropped from the womb with a trick, probably learned deceit at the moment of conception – and then rumours about how quick and unexpected he died. But her beauty had made her desirable, and her married name had made her acceptable. His death gave her freedom and adequate money to enjoy it, and she does so, Monsieur. Close enough to noble society to have enjoyed the right invitations, far enough from the court to have avoided trouble until now. Nothing flagrant, nothing controversial. Gossip about her liaisons of course, Monsieur – and even Guilbert had felt it appropriate only to murmur the names of a certain count, and then, leaning in further, of Danton; Fouché’s eyes widened, not at the idea of Danton’s depravity but at the vast interconnectedness of the world’s – but she keeps them to herself. Parties at her house – near St-Denis – reputed lively – rumoured debauched, but isn’t every party you can’t get into? – but no trouble. Acquaintance with quite a few foreigners – including some English – regulars with her. Perhaps a lover.

  And Fouché’s mind had whirled in this constellation of sins, and foreigners, and Danton, and he had tried to restrain it. Fouché had wondered about Lavalier and her world; and – as the man nodded courteously, and slipped away – about Guilbert and his world.

  Emma was trying to read the strange young man in front of her, and could read nothing. He had noticed her body; he had noticed her face. But they meant nothing to him. His complexion, his lips, and above all his eyes, showed nothing. It was like being watched by a statue. Or a snake. Her costume and her movements and her expression
s were nothing. She was naked in front of him.

  She felt bewilderment, and alarm, within the artfully arranged costume. The short breaths came unfeigned. And then a kind of astonishment: Must I – for the first time since puberty – confront a man as I truly am, without a pretence? And then scorn at herself. Why do I fear this? If this precious identity has been worth protecting all these years, it must have a purpose now.

  She took in one deep breath.

  Let us see who Emma Lavalier may be.

  To Fouché’s utter surprise, the woman Lavalier smiled faintly. What does this mean? Is this some new pretence, or some further mystery of woman?

  For a moment, the shameful flush of his naivety again, the provincial clumsiness he had smoothed away so carefully. I have never encountered people such as – Then the old familiar anger, immediately suppressed and supplanted as always by determination. And they perhaps have never encountered one such as me.

  ‘Why have I been dragged here?’

  ‘Madame, you will be so good as to name for me your acquaintances among the English community in Paris.’

  The Revolution is France, stripped of its facades, confronting all of the aspects of its self.

  Keith Kinnaird stepped cautiously forwards into Pinsent’s room. Pinsent’s face was disturbing enough. Kinnaird was also glancing at the door, and wondering where the pistol was.

  ‘Mr Pinsent? My apologies if I interrupt.’ The door swung shut beside Kinnaird, and the pistol muzzle was an inch from his breast. He took a breath. ‘Good day, Sir Raphael.’

  The insignificance of the man, in the middle of the madness, had Benjamin smiling despite it all – the incongruity; the relief. ‘Good day indeed. Come to sell us some spoons, my dear fellow?’

  Kinnaird just watched him, apparently uncomprehending. ‘Gentlemen, I heard that Madame Lavalier had been arrested – by the regime.’ The Englishmen glanced at each other. ‘You know, no doubt. I wondered if . . . if there was any word of her; if you knew what it meant?’