Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Downing Street
A porter showed Jacob into his audience with the Second Senior Clerk to the minister.
‘Mr Thornbury, I’ve a Dr Sandys for you.’
Thornbury, a prematurely bald man of about Jacob’s age, looked up from the paper bed on which his egg-like head nestled. His eyes held a friendly expression of expectation which told Jacob that Knighton had prepared the way for him.
Jacob bowed. ‘Mr Thornbury, I’m very grateful you can make time for me.’
Thornbury got up and stretched, a bounce in his movement. ‘Make time? My dear sir, you can consider your presence here more as a rescue. I’m positively drowning in paperwork!’ He came out from behind his desk and offered his hand. ‘Ever been in government?’
Jacob shook his head. ‘Though I’ve had dealings with the military authorities running a field hospital. I have some idea of the mountains of paperwork involved.’
‘I’ve reports coming in from all over the world and I’m supposed to make sense of them – a hopeless task, as whatever action we might’ve taken is likely out of date now.
You have to hope the man on the spot is up to snuff and can take the initiative.
’ Thornbury reached for his hat on the hatstand. ‘Chop?’
It took Jacob a second to realise this was an invitation to go to a chophouse for a bite to eat. Some days when investigating he could find himself skipping meals; today appeared to be making up for that.
‘An excellent idea.’
‘Let’s go to the Silver Cross.’
They marched quickly up Whitehall, past Melbourne House where a few months ago Jacob had met Lord Byron at one of Lady Caroline Lamb’s fashionable daytime dancing parties.
He was struck now by how close the two worlds were – the serious business of running the British Empire next to the frivolous one of flirtation and balls.
Thornbury didn’t even spare the house a glance, paying as little attention to the glittering sons and daughters of high society as they paid to him.
The Foreign Office man pushed into the fug of beer and smoke, fighting his way through to a spare table near the back of the tavern. A waiter, a sly fellow with eyes that were everywhere but on the customer he was serving, approached.
‘Two chops and two pints of my usual,’ said Thornbury.
‘Right away, sir.’ The waiter sloped away to fill the order. Places like these liked to serve quickly to maximise the number of customers they could seat in the dinner hour.
Thornbury slid into the bench seat, the high back cutting down the buzz of noise. ‘Hope you don’t mind me ordering for you? I don’t have long.’
‘Not at all.’ Jacob gave the room a swift survey.
The majority of customers were government servants like Thornbury.
Nobody spared them a second glance, heads down over their plates, newspapers folded on the table in front of them as they scanned the houses for sale, auctions to be held, books published and coroners’ reports.
‘Did Knighton explain why I wished to speak to you?’
Thornbury nodded. ‘The D’Antraigues murders. Terrible business. Why do you want to dig all that up? The servant did himself in before we got to him – saved the hangman a noose, I suppose.’
Jacob agreed with Thornbury but he had a client to satisfy. ‘The person who asked me to investigate is worried that wild tales about the late comte will begin to circulate once the ton return for the season, that speculation could harm the living.’
The waiter slapped two tankards down with little ceremony, froth spilling over the side to ring the pewter mugs. ‘Be right back with your chops, sir,’ he said as if he hadn’t just created a wash of ale on the table.
Thornbury grinned, amused rather than annoyed by the casual service. ‘They’re busy.’
‘So I see.’ Jacob moved his mug out of the puddle.
‘As for wild speculation, D’Antraigues was one of those characters who lived a life stranger than anything you could read about in a gothic novel. If rumours are spreading, then I suggest they might be true.’
That wasn’t helpful, but before Jacob could remark on this, the waiter was back. This time the gravy went flying when he banged the plates down. Prepared, Jacob grabbed his elbow before he could retreat.
‘Cloth?’
The waiter looked at him as if he were speaking Greek.
‘For the table?’
With a harrumph of annoyance, the waiter tugged a rag from his belt and ineffectually wiped the surface, leaving a good smear of beery gravy behind.
Thornbury’s eyes were laughing even if he was too polite to snigger. ‘My advice is don’t rest your elbows on the table. Let’s set to. They’ll want the table in a quarter of an hour.’
Warned, Jacob began carving up his chop. At least this was cooked well, not overdone so that the meat resembled boot leather; rather, it melted in the mouth after a few chews.
‘Good?’ asked Thornbury.
‘Surprisingly, yes.’
‘That’s why I put up with the service.’
‘If many rumours are circulating, perhaps you could help me to distinguish fact from fiction. What do you know about the comte?’
Thornbury chugged his beer then wiped his mouth. ‘I glanced at the file before you arrived to refresh my memory, but I’m not sure that we know everything. I do know that he had a falling out with Bonaparte in 1797, when the emperor was still a general.’
‘They met personally?’
‘Oh, yes, D’Antraigues had that dubious honour.
Napoleon arrested the comte in Trieste and interrogated him.
You should remember that the balance of power was shifting in France at that point.
None of us was sure who was going to come out on top.
The nobility who had lost everything in the revolution were wondering if it was their moment to come back and reassert their claims, D’Antraigues among them.
That wasn’t welcome to the new men in the military like Napoleon, who didn’t want their gains to be squandered.
The generals saw a chance to take over from the civilians in Paris. ’
‘I remember. We had wondered if the revolution was about to collapse in on itself.’
‘Napoleon stopped it, or at least forced it to change direction, so France dropped into his hands like a ripe plum.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He made the classic move of a would-be dictator. He discredited his opposition, the old guard, claiming they would reverse all the advances the people had made and set the clock back to before 1789. Bonaparte needed proof they were plotting against France so he claimed to have found material damaging to the royalists in exile in the comte’s possession.
Old Boney is nothing if not a good sophist for his own cause.
He used it to ruin D’Antraigues’s party’s chances in regaining a foothold, and turned the royalists against D’Antraigues, who many believed had betrayed them. ’
‘Betrayed them in what manner?’
Thornbury leaned closer, almost put his sleeve on the table, then thought better of it. ‘It was suspected that the so-called dossier against the royalists was concocted by D’Antraigues in a bargain for his life.’
‘The bargain being one made with Napoleon?’
‘Correct.’
‘So how did he go from that to being a British government pensioner? Surely you wouldn’t trust him after suspecting he betrayed the royalists?’
Thornbury’s smile was sardonic. ‘Why blame a man for what he had to do to survive? There was no love lost between a prisoner and his captor, believe me.’
Jacob recalled the bitterness of Lord Elgin, another of Bonaparte’s prisoners, who left by making a bargain with the French emperor. ‘That I can believe. Then how did he travel from prison in Trieste to a fashionable house in London – two houses, in fact?’
‘I’m not the expert on his movements. With a man like that, you are always going to be left with questions.’
‘What can you tell me?’
Thornbury polished his plate with a crust of bread. ‘He went to Austria where he approached several European governments for work.’
‘What kind of work?’ asked Jacob as Thornbury made sure he caught every scrap of gravy. Jacob felt he was doing the same in terms of the conversation – trying to gather every crumb the man could offer.
‘Reporting on the French for their enemies, claiming to use his old contacts to have privileged insight as to what was going on inside Napoleon’s regime, that kind of thing. War makes us all hungry for information and he was willing to feed us.’ He chewed his crust as if to underline the point.
‘But if his relations with the royalists were ruined, and he had been arrested by the regime, who were his trusted sources?’
Thornbury smiled cynically at him. ‘Who indeed? I think there were those that understood his compromises, and his wife still had her friends. Add too that he was persuasive; he could make a whole cloth out of the patches of information he gathered, so much so that the Russians took him on as an analyst of French affairs. He was attached to their legation in Dresden, their tame Frenchman who could explain the machinations in Napoleon’s circle.
It helped that he’d published an excellent anti-Bonapartist tract in 1805, proving his writing talents. ’
‘I can imagine he was very helpful to the Russians. We were all astonished by the meteoric rise of Napoleon and needed someone to explain it to us.’
‘Quite so. Unfortunately for the comte, the Russians were embarking on one of their periodic rapprochements with the French, deciding they weren’t so bad after all and we British were the enemy.
It became embarrassing for the Tsar to host an outspoken critic of the French emperor in his legation.
That made things too hot for D’Antraigues in Dresden, despite the fact that Prince Czartoryski backed the comte. ’
‘Czartoryski? Tsar Alexander’s foreign minister?’
‘He certainly had the Tsar’s ear on such things. But the Russian court, like the French, is a merry-go-round. The prince fell from favour in 1806, taking his protégés with him.’
‘Including the comte?’