‘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 thecomte?’
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 afalling 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 thecomtein 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 thecomte’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–twohouses, 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; hecould 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 thecomte, 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 thecomte.’
‘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 thecomte?’
‘Exactly. Prince Czartoryski is loyal to his people, though, and he called in several favours to get the Comte D’Antraigues and family to London. Czartoryski made a kind of gift of D’Antraigues to us, in fact, knowing we would find thecomteuseful. The file gets more detailed from then on, fairly voluminous in fact.’
‘Who writes all these reports?’
