His features had been reported as handsome and ordinary. He had been described as tall and of medium height, slight and muscular. Yet his suits had been made to the same measurements for years, and he certainly had neither shrunk nor grown.
There was artifice in the thing; but a magician didn’t share secrets.
He was fluent in six languages, but could make himself understood in rather more, with no discernible foreign accent—when he chose not to display one. For the present, a twist of Boston gentry served his purpose.
His name was not Chaucer. Even Georges Cadoudal didn’t know what it was. Then again, the Royalist leader had been only vaguely aware of his existence until one foul English night.…
Cadoudal had little respect for Geoffrey Randle, fourth Earl of Rexborough; his host.
The man had spent his first twenty years with no expectation of assuming his father’s title, and so had squandered his youth hunting by day and gambling at night. By the time his eldest brother died of smallpox and the brother next in line lost his life on the field of honor, the family hopes for Geoffrey had run their course, ending in a fatal apoplectic stroke for his father, the third earl, when his only remaining heir was named as co-respondent in a public divorce case.
The brother had died because Geoffrey had not made good on a gambling debt; Geoffrey himself could not be bothered, and so the formality of a duel had fallen to his sibling, along with its tragic outcome. The new earl had been ejected from all but one of the gentlemen’s clubs in London and had established a reputation for philandering that was nearly as notorious as his wife’s.
Privately, Cadoudal suspected Lord Rexborough’s romantic relationships ended in disappointment for his partners.
He was simply too good-looking, with his thick coppery hair shorn short against current fashion, his face shaven close by a barber, and his waist and hips narrowing to well-shaped legs in skin-tight breeches. He was either impotent or a pouf. Lady Rexborough’s escapades were likely the result of frustration at home rather than public humiliation.
Now nearer forty than thirty, the peer was losing those good looks. His appetite for brandy and port had consigned his storied waist to a corset, and as for his hair, his guest, who remembered the glory days of the French court, knew a henna treatment when he saw one. His face was ruddy, certainly not from the watery English sun, and there were burst blood vessels in his cheeks. He was one of those men who resembled boys well into middle-age, then became old overnight. Daily, it seemed, the ten-year age difference between Randle and his radiant blond wife became more marked.
The leader of the French Royalists despised the man, but took pains not to show it; Rexborough was his benefactor, after all.
Randle’s wasn’t the only house in England that would harbor a man condemned to death at home, but it was the only one Cadoudal trusted not to be riddled with paid informants.
Although he knew it was no secret where he was living—Joseph Fouché’s system for gathering intelligence was the envy of all the nervous crowned heads of Europe—he slept soundly in his borrowed bed, secure in the belief that no greedy footman or chambermaid would conveniently leave a door unbarred to an assassin in the dead of night; for Lord Rexborough, who had never had reason to learn the value of money, overpaid his staff ludicrously. No one-time bribe was worth the loss of a position whose benefits could not be duplicated. It would take a troupe of French cavalry to remove Cadoudal from that rambling country manor, and even Bonaparte wasn’t so reckless as to risk war with Great Britain merely to bring one man to justice.
It would be rash, however, to count upon the Corsican’s restraint for long. The affair of Christmas Eve had placed everything in a state of uncertainty.
The fools. He had intended merely to humiliate the upstart, not make him a martyr.
The one club to which the earl still belonged had no official name and no fixed place of residence. It was not registered like the others. Its rolls included a former prime minister, the current Home Secretary, members of the House of Lords, and the owners of a half-dozen firms that conducted business with the British military and the royal family. (Rumor held that at least one member of that family belonged also.) They met infrequently and never twice in the same place in succession, not to play cards or socialize, but to plot the destruction of the French Republic.
Those who whispered of the association’s existence referred to it as the Cutthroat Club.
Some of these men detested Rexborough. Others, remembering their own checkered histories, refused to judge him. They all tolerated him because he could finance the lion’s share of any plan that would hasten the fall of the current government across the Channel, return a Bourbon to the throne, and spare England from the same ghastly egalitarian fate that had snatched America from its grasp. The mere thought of a commoner determining the course of a nation chilled their already icy blood.
Rexborough was neither political nor a patriot. He was just bored. With the doors of all the gambling houses closed to him, intrigue was the only game in town. It amused him to bankroll the destruction of foreign states the same way he’d laid bets against the house.
Cadoudal had no use for any of them; beyond, of course, their assistance. He was a Breton himself, like the late François Carbon (may he rot in hell for an imbecile), and knew too well the ways of the English to trust them to act upon any motive other than their own best interests.
They were quick to move against any country that threatened their colonial investments in Europe and Africa, but rarely exposed themselves to fire, paying others to fight in their stead. The dunes of the Sahara drifted over the carcasses of thousands of Mameluks who had died for the British cotton trade; the Austrian Empire had paid for its Anglo alliance with the slaughter of its troops in Italy.
But their purses were deep, these English, and if history had taught him nothing else, it was that in the end, gold trumped iron. Bonaparte’s army was no match for the Bank of England.
Cadoudal at forty-five was ugly by any standard: toadish, with a broken nose like a torn iron coupling and one watery eye larger than its mate, a deformity of birth; a Royalist general who resembled a rank sergeant. Brute strength had earned him respect. He was heavily muscled but fat. His belly had swollen on an English diet of boiled beef, suety puddings, and fruit so thoroughly stewed he suspected Rexborough’s cook had set out deliberately to constipate him. He consoled himself with the advantage gained: A man sitting waiting to make stool found time to hatch plots.
It had been during one of those sessions, distracting himself from his misery with a week-old copy of the Times of London, that he’d learned of the “infernal machine” that had destroyed much of the Rue Saint-Nicaise while failing in its object, to destroy Bonaparte. The Jacobins were blamed. He’d shaken his head, both at the callous disregard for innocent life and at the crudity of the attempt. It was just like those Republican fanatics to attempt such a thing. They had learned nothing since the Terror. Plainly they’d acted exactly as they had in 1789, lashing out at the most obvious target without thought as to what should follow: no plan save chaos, and chaos the inevitable result.
And it had made things that much more difficult for his own strategy to succeed, of capturing Bonaparte alive and holding him hostage until Paris capitulated and welcomed back the Ancien Regime. That devil Fouché, who never missed an opportunity to tighten his hold on the citizenry, would use the incident as an excuse to isolate the First Consul even further from the people who had put him in power, and from those who would remove him.
Before now, the Strong Man of France had ridden at the head of victory parades astride a white horse, dressed in his famous cocked hat and gray greatcoat, within arm’s length of the throngs lining the pavement for a glimpse. From now on he would cower in his coach, ringed on all sides by grenadiers.
The thought had not occurred to Cadoudal, even during the painful straining to void his bowels, that the very men he had entrusted with that plan were the ones who had touched off the gunpowder.
When Carbon and Saint-Réjant were taken and stood before muskets, having named him as the mastermind behind the slaughter, he had kicked in a panel of the tall mahogany cabinet Rexborough had lent him to hang his clothes, including his old field uniform. The white cockade of saner days looked at him like a sad wise old eye.
“What does this mean to us?”
The earl, who had brought him the news, seemed amused, as if this were a game of whist and his opponent had played the one hand he hadn’t expected. A man for whom money sprouted from the ground, who knew no loyalties except to his appetites, had no concept of loss.
But Cadoudal, who like any good general grasped the situation well enough to begin thinking how to reverse it, was calm after his outburst.
“You are a gambler, my friend, and my English is faulty, mixed with Celtic and border French. What is the phrase, when one lays a wager and another matches it?”
“‘Fold’?”
“No. When one does not wish to retire from play. There is a phrase, I know.”
The earl grinned suddenly, like a pupil who’d stumbled on the answer despite himself. “‘Raise the ante.’”
“Yes! My hand is forced. Now we raise the ante. Bonaparte must die!”
“Oh, jolly good!”
The idiot.
Carolyn Randle disapproved of her husband’s guest; but since she disapproved of her husband, she found the imposition no less bearable than life in general.
One day there would be a term to describe Lady Rexborough: “Professional beauty.” She had no skills worthy of public consumption, beyond the obligatory sketching in parlors and piano lessons, activities designed by the upper classes to pass a young matron’s time while her husband was off killing small creatures or betting a banker’s wages on the turn of a tile.
In town, she rode in open carriages under elaborate bonnets and parasols, lifting the spirits of the creatures who lined the streets hoping for a glimpse at perfection; in the country, she batted wooden balls about the lawn, discussed menus with the cook like a general planning a campaign, and smiled politely at the gray men who filed into the library to smoke cigars and stoke their gout with fortified wine. She was, as had been written about her, like a spray of fresh flowers brought suddenly into a winter room: breathtakingly fresh, indescribably lovely, and heartbreakingly fragile.
Not to mention utterly without shame.
There was, in truth, an ephemeral quality about her golden hair worn in a simple chignon (to keep the damn strands off her face), ceramic-blue eyes, and rose-stained cheeks, that seemed destined not to live out the day. The same had been said about her for a decade. She had reached her peak at eighteen, and had been holding that position like a grim and determined veteran soldier ever since. She had the athletic figure of a Diana, with just enough Aphrodite above the waist to sacrifice eye contact with every man she met, and was, as her husband had observed of her before his intimates, in a perpetual state of heat.
Well, what of it? Certainly there was no remedy for it in milord’s bed. Someone in the arrangement ought to have needs.
Their guest, the Brittany Frenchman, was not one of them. That great belly, and the arrogance of his conduct, made it easy for her to assume the role of charming hostess only. She gathered that he was one of those émigrés from the Parisian court who had been polluting the English population with their pompous ways and impossible accents for a dozen years, but knew nothing about him except that he enjoyed the hospitality of the house without offering to contribute to its upkeep.
Her husband seemed fascinated with the fellow; he was his latest avocation. Geoffrey had given up racing horses and collecting Medieval armor, but hadn’t troubled to sell the paddock or the breastplates, visors, gauntlets, pauldrons, and cuirasses that gathered dust in piles throughout the house. He would tire of the unpleasant foreigner as well. She just hoped that when the time came, he wouldn’t forget to show him out. Like his other interests, his forgotten guests had a habit of loitering about.
Someone put the great bronze front-door knocker to use. The noise thundered along ancient rafters.
She looked at one of the clocks that were always chiming out of step in that drafty barn. Another visitor, at that hour? She lifted her skirts and went toward the entrance hall.
“The general is expecting me.” A pleasant light baritone, foreign but cultured, and strange to the house.
She got to the hall just as the butler took the man’s hat and greatcoat. Both were dry; a fortnight of winter drizzle had given way to a sky aswirl with stars. The servant looked expectantly at the object standing on the floor at the visitor’s feet.
The man shook his head. “Thank you, but I’ll keep the valise.”