The Rising Storm Page 2
That spring of 1787, so desperate had the financial situation become that the King had resorted to an expedient which none of his predecessors had been forced to adopt for over a hundred and fifty years—the summoning of an Assembly of Notables at Versailles to discuss ways and means of re-establishing the nation’s credit. But instead of accepting their advice his Ministers had endeavoured to use them as support for a new patchwork of ineffective measures. The nobles and the higher clergy, of which the Notables were almost entirely composed, had become openly resentful, and the Parliament of Paris had refused to register the new edicts. Thereupon the King had temporarily exiled the Parliament to Troyes and dissolved the Assembly; so, far from any good having come out of this meeting, the grievances of the nation had received the widest possible publicity, which led to still more violent agitation against the incompetent Government.
For a further year the ancien régime had been bolstered up by one expedient after another, but by the summer of ’88, faced with an empty treasury, the King had been driven to dismiss his principal Minister, the vain and ineffectual Lomenie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse, and recall the Swiss banker, Monsieur Necker, who, since he held the most liberal views, had the confidence of the public. It had then been decided to give way to the insistent demand for the calling of an Etats General—the nearest thing France could be said to have to an assembly truly representative of the nation.
As a States General had not been convened since 1614 many months had elapsed since the decision to call one, while innumerable questions of procedure were argued by a second Assembly of Notables, and arrangements made for the election of clergy, nobles and commoners to the Three Estates which it comprised; but at last all these matters had been settled and the deputies were to meet at Versailles in the coming month.
The hopes placed in the outcome of this meeting were many and varied. The King hoped it would find him a way out of his financial difficulties without loss of his authority, the people that it would lead to a reduction of their taxes, Monsieur Necker that it would result in his increased prestige, and both the bourgeoisie and the majority of the nobles and clergy that out of it would emerge some form of constitutional government.
But until it actually met one man’s guess was as good as another’s It might become a permanent institution on the lines of the British Parliament, or it might be summarily dismissed after a few ineffectual sessions, as had been the Assembly of Notables. It was to assess the most likely possibility that Roger Brook had been sent to France, and, further, to form a well-grounded opinion as to what would follow in either case.
If the Estates were abruptly dismissed, would that lead to open rebellion—or even civil war? If so was it likely or unlikely that Louis XVI would succeed in holding down his rebellious subjects? Was there any likelihood of him granting his people a Constitution? If that occurred and the Estates became a permanent body with legislative powers, who would dominate it—Necker or some other? And would whoever it might be incline to friendship or enmity with Britain? All this and much more Mr. Pitt was most anxious to know, so that as the situation developed he might adjust his policy accordingly.
Roger had just spent a fortnight in Paris. He had looked up a number of old acquaintances and made many new ones; he had talked with innumerable people in cafés, shops and places of entertainment. Having lived for so long in France he already knew that the average Englishman’s belief, that the French were a nation of bloodthirsty cut-throats dominated by a leaven of fastidious but decadent and unscrupulous aristocrats, was far from the mark; and that in reality the individuals of the two races were inspired in their private lives by very similar thoughts and feelings. But on his return to the French capital he was very soon conscious of two things.
Firstly, although he had thought himself so well informed at the age of nineteen, how abysmally ignorant he had really been upon a great variety of matters. Secondly, that a quite staggering change had taken place in the mentality of the French people.
Previously, with the exception of one in a thousand, they had given their whole minds to business and pleasure, regarding politics as a thing apart that concerned only the King and his Ministers: so that however much they might deplore the state into which their country had fallen it was futile for them to think about it, since it was quite impossible for them to influence the future course of events. But now, with the extraordinary innovation of being given the opportunity to elect representatives who would voice their opinions, politics had entered like a virus into the blood of the whole race. They were like a child with a new toy, and wherever he went people were discussing in a most heated fashion the forthcoming meeting of the States General, the excellencies of Monsieur Necker or the iniquities of the “Austrian woman”, as they now called the Queen. It was therefore easy for him to gather a consensus of opinion and his unobtrusive activities had soon led him to three definite conclusions:—
That the people of Paris were not in the main antagonistic towards the King or the monarchy, as such; but they were towards the Queen and a continuance of absolutism. That there would be serious trouble if the King dismissed the States with nothing accomplished. And that His Highness the Duc d’Orléans was sailing very near treason in some of his measures to gain popularity for himself at the expense of the Court and his cousin the King.
From the provincials he met he gathered that the elections had set the whole country in a ferment, and that opinion in the big cities, particularly Marseilles and Lyons, was running nearly as strongly in favour of forcing some definite concession from the King as it was in Paris; but a tour of the provincial cities to verify these possibly biased statements would have been a lengthy undertaking, and he had felt that in any case feeling in them could have little influence on events during the opening sessions of the States. On the other hand the much abused Court might yet have some strong cards up its sleeve to play in an emergency, so he had decided that his next step must be an attempt to ascertain its real strength and disposition.
He needed no telling that it was one thing to lounge about Paris listening to any idler who cared to air his views and quite another to become acquainted with those of the King and his advisers; so on his arrival at Fontainebleau, five nights before, he had been very conscious that only then had his real mission begun, and from the first he had been extremely perplexed how to set about it.
Short of some unforeseen stroke of fortune, or the exercise of an ingenuity which seemed to have entirely deserted him in these past few days, the only means of securing the entrée to the royal circle was the normal one of being formally presented at the French Court; and during his previous stay in France his only visits to Versailles had been in the guise of a confidential secretary bringing papers to his master, the Marquis de Rochambeau, when that nobleman occupied his apartment in the Palace overnight.
Any travelling Englishman of good family could easily arrange for the British Ambassador to present him, but it was obviously impossible for Roger to do so and at the same time preserve his incognito. To abandon it would, he felt, be to throw away his best card for finding out the true situation at the very opening of the game; although to maintain it at Court would entail a certain risk, as the de Rochambeau family knew him to be English.
However, he had made careful enquiries before leaving Paris and learned that the old Marquis had for the past year or more retired to his estates in Brittany, his son, Count Lucien, was with his regiment in Artois, and the beautiful Athénaïs, whom he had loved so desperately, was also living in Brittany with her husband, the Vicomte de la Tour d’Auvergne. There remained the factor that a number of the Marquis’s friends would also almost certainly remember him, but he doubted if any of them had chapter and verse about his antecedents and felt reasonably confident that he would be able to fob off any inconvenient questions concerning his past with a convincing story.
So, having weighed the pros and cons of the matter, he had decided to continue using his soubriquet of M. le C
hevalier de Breuc, thus allowing everyone to assume that he was a Frenchman, but to leave himself an open door in case of trouble by refraining from any definite statement that he was one. He was still far from happy in his mind about this uneasy compromise, but felt that it was the best at which he could arrive for the moment, and that it would be time enough to develop a more definite policy, according to events, if, and when, he could devise a way to be received behind those golden doors.
To walk in to a reception without knowing anyone there to whom he could address a single word would be to invite discovery and expulsion—if not actual arrest. So he had felt that his best hope lay in making the acquaintance at his fashionable inn of some well-placed courtier who would in due course invite his company to a levee or entertainment, on the assumption that he had already been presented; for, once inside, it was a hundred to one against the King remembering if he was one of the thousands of young nobles who had been presented to him in their teens or not.
But the trouble was that he had found no stool-pigeon suitable for such a manœuvre staying at the inn; neither had one appeared since his arrival, and it looked as if he might kick his heels there for weeks before one did. Moreover, frequent walks in the grounds of the Château and many hours spent lounging about its long, lofty corridors had equally failed to produce the type of chance acquaintance that he was seeking.
The factor that he had failed to take into his calculations when making this somewhat vague plan on his way from Paris was the election of Deputies to the States General. It was not only the People who were electing candidates to represent them in the Third Estate, but the First and Second—clergy and nobles—were not to sit by right of their episcopal ranks and hereditary titles; they too were to elect representatives from their own Orders. In consequence, for the first time in generations, nearly the whole nobility of France had gone to the provinces, where they were either intriguing to get themselves sent to Versailles as Deputies or supporting the candidates they favoured in their districts; so the Court and Fontainebleau were practically deserted.
Roger had been riding for well over an hour and, cudgel his wits as he would, could still see no way out of his difficulty, when up the long ride through the greenwood he saw a horseman coming towards him at a gentle canter. As the approaching figure grew nearer he could see it to be that of a lanky gentleman with narrow shoulders and a long, lean face, who appeared to be in his middle thirties. He was well mounted on a powerful bay but his dress, although of rich materials, was too flashy to be in good taste.
As the two horsemen came abreast both gave the casual nod which is habitual to strangers passing one another in the country, and as they did so each looked straight into the other’s eyes for a moment without either showing any sign of recognition. Roger was still deeply absorbed by his own problem, and it was only after the lanky man had cantered on for a hundred yards or so that he began to wonder vaguely where he had seen that lantern-jawed countenance before.
Having gazed at it only a few moments since from less than a dozen feet away it was easy to recall the man’s quick, intelligent brown eyes, his full, sensual mouth, slightly receding chin, and the small scar on his left cheek that ran up to the corner of his eye, pulling the lower lid down a little and giving him a faintly humorous expression.
For a good five minutes Roger’s mind, now fully distracted from its task, strove to link up those features with some memory of the past. His thoughts naturally reverted to the time when he had lived at the Hôtel de Rochambeau in Paris, and the many nobles who used to throw him a nod or a smile when they came there to see his master; but he did not think, somehow, that the lean-faced man was a noble, in spite of his fine horse and expensive clothes. After a little he tried to thrust the matter from his mind as of no importance; but the lean face would persist in coming back, so he began to range over the public dance-places and the inns that he had frequented while in Paris.
Suddenly something clicked in Roger’s brain. Upon the instant he tightened his rein, turned his surprised mount right about and set off up the glade at a furious gallop. The fellow’s name was Etienne de Roubec and he styled himself M. de Chevalier, but Roger thought his right to the title extremely dubious. He had met de Roubec at an inn in Le Havre on the very first night he had spent in France; but that was now nearly six years ago, and the Chevalier had then been a seedy-looking, down-at-heel individual in a threadbare red velvet coat.
As Roger urged his mare on over the soft, spring turf he was cursing himself for the time he had taken to identify his old acquaintance. He had a score to settle with de Roubec and the angry determination to call the fellow to account that now surged up in him seemed to have lost nothing of its violence during the five years and nine months since they had last met. His only fear was that as they had passed one another going in opposite directions and de Roubec had been moving at a canter he might, in the past seven or eight minutes, have turned down a side glade and ridden along it so far that it would prove impossible to find and overtake him.
Breasting the slight rise with a spurt, Roger peered anxiously forward along the downward slope. It stretched for nearly a mile but de Roubec was not to be seen. He might easily have ridden that far in the time and passed out of sight round the distant bend, so Roger rode on at full tilt. On reaching the bend he found that the ride continued for only a short way then ended in a wide clearing where four other rides met. Hastily he cast about from one to another; of de Roubec there was no sign, but up one of the rides a carriage was approaching.
While he was still frantically wondering which ride de Roubec had taken the vehicle entered the clearing. It was a closed carriage drawn by four fine greys which were moving at a smart trot. Evidently it was the equipage of some wealthy person, but there was no coat of arms decorating the panels of its doors and the coachman, as well as the footman who stood on the boot clinging to straps at its back, were both dressed in plain, sober liveries.
As it passed Roger caught a brief glimpse of its interior through the open window. Two women were seated inside; both wore their hair dressed high in the fashion of the day and upon the coiffure of each reposed an absurd little beflowered straw hat tilted rakishly forward; and both of them were masked.
In Paris, or any other city, there was at that time nothing at all unusual about a lady unaccompanied by a cavalier wearing a black silk mask while she drove through the streets, either by night or day. The custom had originated as a form of protection for young and attractive gentlewomen from the unwelcome attentions of street gallants, but it had proved such a boon to ladies wishing to make their way unrecognised to secret rendezvous with their lovers that, in this century when illicit love affairs were the fashion, the practice had continued to flourish. But it struck Roger as most surprising that two ladies should wear masks while taking a drive through the almost deserted forest of Fontainebleau in the middle of the afternoon.
As he stared after them with swiftly awakened curiosity, his glance fell upon some fresh hoof-marks plainly outlined on a muddy patch to one side of the track that the carriage had taken. Unless some other solitary horseman had recently passed that way they could only have been made by de Roubec’s bay. With fresh hope of catching his quarry, Roger set spurs to his mount and cantered on in the wake of the mysterious ladies.
Some three hundred yards from the glade the ride curved sharply. The carriage was just about to round the bend as Roger came up behind it. Guiding his mare a little to the left, he made to pass. As he did so he saw that a quarter of a mile ahead there was apparently another clearing. A giant oak rose in solitary splendour from the place where the centre of the track would otherwise have been, and immediately beneath it, quietly sitting on his horse, was de Roubec.
The second Roger caught sight of the Chevalier he dropped back behind the carriage. The fact that de Roubec had halted under the giant oak suggested that he had come there to keep a secret rendezvous with the masked ladies. From the outset Roger had realised that de Ro
ubec’s mount was much faster than his own hired hack, and had feared that if the Chevalier thought himself pursued he might easily use the superior speed of his bay to escape an unwelcome encounter. Therefore it seemed to him now that his best hope of getting within speaking distance of his quarry unseen lay in continuing on in the wake of the carriage.
As he trotted along, crouched low over his mare’s neck so that his hat should not be visible to de Roubec above the line of the carriage roof, he feared every moment that the footman perched on the boot would turn and see him. But the hoof-beats of his mare were lost in those of the four greys, and, even when they pulled up under the great oak, the man did not glance behind him. Like a well-trained servant he instantly leapt from his stand and ran round to the side of the carriage to open its door for his mistress.
As he did so Roger slipped from his saddle to the ground. For a moment he stood there, holding his mare by the bridle; but she was a quiet old nag and, seeing that she at once started to nibble the grass of the track, he let her go, then stepped forward and peered cautiously from his hiding-place.
De Roubec, hat in hand, was bowing low over his horse’s neck. One of the ladies was leaning out of the carriage door. In her hand she was holding out to him a fat packet. Roger had himself once entrusted a fat packet to de Roubec, with dire results. At the sight of the present scene the memory of all that he had suffered in consequence of placing his trust in the Chevalier smarted like an open wound. On the instant he decided that he would not stand by and see this unknown lady tricked as he had been. But if he was to prevent it immediate action was called for; the second de Roubec saw him he might snatch the packet, gallop off with it and be lost for good.
With one swift, well-practised movement Roger drew his long sword. At the same instant he sprang forward. De Roubec was just taking the packet from the masked lady and each still held a corner of it. Simultaneously both let out a gasp of amazement at Roger’s totally unexpected appearance. As they stared at him, transfixed by surprise, his sword flashed in an unerring lunge and the tip of the bright blade passed through the centre of the flat parcel.