Sea Change (20 page)

Estelle slipped off the gown. It fell about her feet. The firelight behind her revealed the outline of her body through the shift. Desire engulfed Spandrel. He had to have her. What he would not even have dreamt to be possible when they had met in the library at her husband's house in Amsterdam was suddenly and deliriously about to happen. He reached out. She grasped his hand and slowly led it to her breast, full and soft beneath the shift. The warmth of her thrilled through him.

'Estelle—'

'Don't say anything.' She drew him closer. 'Whatever pleasure I can give… is yours to take.'

There were times — most of them when he was swaying in a strange kind of litter on the shoulders of four mountain porters with nothing but their sureness of hand between him and a sheer drop into a chasm of pure white snow and stark black rock — when Nicholas Cloisterman came seriously to doubt that he would survive the Alpine crossing. He remembered his Classics master at King's, Canterbury, pondering the puzzle of which route Hannibal had taken, elephants and all, back in 218 b.c. and was now quite certain on one point: it could not have been the Simplon Pass.

Arriving at Brig after a three-day journey from Baden, Cloisterman had joined a small party of travellers bound for Milan, happy as they were to accept his share of the cost of hiring guides and porters. The journey that followed was occasionally awe-inspiring, so vast and majestic were the Alps in their late winter grimness. But it was more often bone-numbingly cold and hair-raisingly hazardous. For Cloisterman the relief that he felt as they descended to Lake Maggiore was tempered only by the awareness that he would have to come back this way, though not, it was true, in late winter.

As to what season it would be, spring or summer, he had no way to tell. There had been no word at Brig of a lone female traveller. His enquiry on the subject had yielded nothing beyond the suggestion that, at this time of the year, he had to be joking. Nor did the British Consul at Milan, an amiable sinecurist called Phelps, prove any more helpful. Of Estelle de Vries there was no trace. Where she was remained a mystery. But where she was going was certain. And Cloisterman would have to follow.

'Business in Rome, is it?' remarked Phelps. 'I don't envy you, I must say. Concerns the Pretender, does it?'

'What makes you think so?' Cloisterman responded warily.

'Nothing else seems to take Government men that way. You know the wretched fellow has a son and heir now?'

'Of course.' News of the birth of a male to the Stuart line a couple of months previously had travelled fast.

'Horribly healthy, I gather.'

'How pleasing for his parents.'

'But not our employers, eh? Well, I wish you luck, whatever your business.' Phelps grinned. 'I expect you'll need it.'

A man in still greater need of luck than Cloisterman was Chancellor of the Exchequer John Aislabie, whose trial commenced at the House of Commons in London on the very afternoon of Cloisterman's unilluminating conversation with Consul Phelps in Milan.

Alas for Aislabie, luck did not come his way. The consequences of another acquittal following Charles Stanhope's evasion of justice were too serious to be contemplated. Walpole said nothing in defence of Aislabie, whose explanation that he had burnt all records of his dealings in South Sea stock because they were of no importance once settled was not well received. Small wonder, since those dealings had netted him a profit of £35,000. He was convicted, expelled from the House and consigned to the Tower, there to languish until occasion could be found to anatomize his estate and decide how much of it, if not all, should be forfeit.

Celebratory bonfires were lit across London as the news spread. Public anger was appeased. 'Sometimes,' remarked Walpole, watching the flames light the night sky from Viscount Townshend's Cockpit office, 'a sacrifice there has to be.'

'Will Aislabie be enough for them?' asked Townshend.

'I'd happily give them Sunderland as well. But the King's uncommonly fond of the fellow. And the King expects me to persuade the House to spare him.'

'Will you be able to?'

'I think so. Just so long as no new evidence turns up.'

'Such as the Green Book? I worry about it, Robin, I really do.'

'So you should. If it fell into the wrong hands…' Walpole cast his brother-in-law a meaningful look. 'They might be lighting bonfires for us as well.'

The four English travellers who arrived in Turin the day after Aislabie's conviction in London had a no less arduous Alpine crossing than Cloisterman to look back on. The vertiginous scramblings of their porters over the wind-scoured Mont Cenis Pass had caused Estelle de Vries no apparent alarm, however. It had therefore been necessary for her male companions to affect a similar unconcern, their true feelings concealed behind devil-may-care quips and high fur collars.

The performance of Buckthorn and Silverwood in this regard had scarcely wavered, although Buckthorn had mentioned wolves often enough to suggest a preoccupation with the subject and Silverwood had manifestly not been amused by the porters' discontented mutterings about his weight.

Spandrel for his part had found it easy to assume an uncharacteristic jauntiness of manner. The frozen beauty of the Alps was something he had never expected to experience. Nor, for that matter, was the sexual favour of such a woman as Estelle de Vries. He had entered a new world in more ways than one and his elation left little space for fear, nor indeed for the thought that Estelle did not and could not love him. She had used the act of love to bind him to her and she had succeeded. The memory of their night together in Geneva was sometimes clearer to Spandrel than the events taking place around him. Like a white flame of refined pleasure, it burned within him. He was hers, completely. And she was his, reservedly. He was aware of the disparity, what it meant and why it existed. He knew the promises he was breaking and the dangers he was ignoring. But he also knew that what she had given him he could not resist.

The cramped accommodation available to Alpine travellers had prevented any immediate repetition of their night of passion. Buckthorn and Silverwood could be given no hint of how matters stood between them. It was one more secret for them to share — the darkest and most delicious of all. At a spacious inn of the sort the Savoyard capital might be expected to boast, however, that secret might both be kept and enjoyed.

But Estelle did not agree. 'We must be careful,' she counselled during a few snatched moments of privacy. 'If Mr Buckthorn and Mr Silverwood should learn that we are lovers, they would be consumed by jealousy. They might also come to doubt that we have given them a true account of ourselves. They are not above spying at corners and listening at keyholes. We must give them nothing to spy upon.'

'We don't need them any more,' Spandrel protested. 'Let's go on alone.'

'It was agreed that they would accompany me to Florence. I cannot spurn them now. To Florence we must go — together.'

'And after Florence?'

'You'll have me all to yourself.'

It was a promise and a lure. Florence was the better part of a week away. Until then…

'Don't spoil what we have, William. There's so much more to come. Very soon.' She kissed him. 'Trust me.'

He did not trust her, of course. He could never do that. But he did adore her. And he was not sure that he would ever do otherwise.

'Mr Walpole,' the Earl of Sunderland announced in a tone of mock geniality as he stepped into the Paymaster-General's office at the Cockpit the following morning. 'I'm a little surprised to find you here, I must say.'

'No more than I'm surprised to see you here,' growled Walpole.

'I only meant that so many posts are said to be within your grasp — more I sometimes think than are not — that it's a touch disconcerting to realize that in truth you're still only' — Sunderland looked about him and smiled — 'the Army's wages clerk.'

'What can I do for you, Spencer?'

'It's what I can do for you that brings me here, my dear fellow.'

'Good of you to think of me when you've so much else on your mind.'

'The trial, you mean? Next week's… grand entertainment.'

'Your trial.'

'We all have trials. Some bear them better than others.'

'Some have more to bear.'

'Indeed.' Sunderland plucked his snuff-box from his coat pocket and took a pinch, as if needing to clear his nose of some unpleasant smell. 'I have… disappointing news for you. I'm sure you'll… bear it well.'

'What news?'

'A Secret Service report, the contents of which I thought it kinder to convey to you personally than… through the normal channels.'

Soon, very soon, Walpole consoled himself, the Secret Service would be reporting to him, not Sunderland. Then he would be the one doling out their nuggets of intelligence to those he judged fit to hear them. Then he would be master. But for the moment, Sunderland still stood above him, albeit on a crumbling pedestal. 'Kind of you, I'm sure.'

'As to kindness, you might not think it so when you hear what I have to tell you.'

Walpole leaned back in his chair and scratched his stomach. 'Well?'

'Colonel Wagemaker. Your… agent.'

'Is that what you think he is?'

'It's what I think he was. Until he was killed in a duel at Berne on the twenty-sixth of last month.'

Walpole summoned a grin to cover his discomposure. 'Wagemaker? Dead?'

'As the mission you sent him on.'

'How's this… said to have happened?'

'A duel of some sort. Details are sparse. But dead he undoubtedly is. It seems you did not choose wisely. As for Townshend's assurances to the King that you and he would soon have the Green Book under lock and key…' Sunderland cocked his head and treated Walpole to a look of distilled condescension. 'What are they worth now?'

'I never put all my eggs in one basket, Spencer. Any more than you do.'

'A hard policy to follow, when the basket is so distant.'

Walpole shrugged. 'Hard, but prudent.'

'Prudent, but unlikely.' Sunderland propped himself on the corner of the desk and held Walpole's gaze. 'Your eggs are smashed, Mr Paymaster. Every last one.'

'I doubt it.'

'Of course you do. Doubt's your stock-in-trade. I'll send you a copy of the report. That should still a few of those doubts.'

'I'm obliged.'

'Obliged to me. Yes. I'm glad you understand that.' Sunderland stood up. 'And I'd be gladder still if you remembered it.' He moved towards the door, then stopped and looked back. 'The King accepts that Aislabie had to go. But he wishes it to end there. He wants no more ministers led away to the Tower.'

'No more than you do, I'm sure.'

'If you aim to win his favour, you'd do well not to disappoint him.'

'I'll see what I can do.'

'If you'll take my advice…' Sunderland's gaze narrowed. 'You'll make sure you do enough.'

The gloom of a London winter seemed far away amidst the balmy pleasantries of a Tuscan spring. Relaxing in the walled garden of the British Consul's Florentine palazzo beneath a sapphire sky, warmed by good food, fine wine and mellow sunshine, Nicholas Cloisterman felt that his journey from Amsterdam was at long last beginning to yield some rewards. His host, Percy Blain, was an intelligent cynic after Cloisterman's own heart and his hostess, Mrs Blain, was proof that cynicism might be a sure guide to many things but not to womankind. After but two nights beneath their roof, he felt that he was among friends.

Nor was friendship the only gift the Blains had bestowed upon him. Blain, in whom he had confided all but the exact nature of the book he was so earnestly seeking on the British Government's behalf, had suggested a precaution they might take, there in Florence, to reduce the likelihood of that book's arrival in Rome.

The precaution depended on the co-operation of the Tuscan authorities and it was the securing of that cooperation which Cloisterman and Blain were now toasting over a glass of excellent local wine beside a plashing fountain and a table still bearing the remnants of a splendid repast.

'How were you able to bring it off?' Cloisterman asked, still unclear on the point. 'The Dutch authorities would have sent me away with a flea in my ear if I'd ever put such a request to them.'

'But the Dutch are a powerful and independent people,' replied Blain. 'What is the Grand Duchy of Tuscany but a pawn on the great powers' chessboard? The Grand Duke is an old man, his son and heir a childless degenerate. The treaty with Spain our late Lord Stanhope spent so much time and effort negotiating cedes Tuscany to the Spaniards when the Medici line fails, which it surely soon will. But Stanhope is dead. New ministers mean new policies. Treaties can be renegotiated. That is the Grand Duke's hope. And that is why his ministers are so keen to oblige us.'

'Every customs post will be on the look-out for Mrs de Vries?'

'Any Englishwoman or Dutchwoman, travelling alone or in company, whatever name she gives, will be stopped and searched. Believe me, the customs men need no encouragement to perform such a task with the utmost diligence.'

'She might not pass through Tuscany.'

'It is a considerable diversion to go round. And from her point of view surely an unnecessary one.'

'True,' Cloisterman conceded. Estelle de Vries would head for Rome by the most direct route. That was certain. And that was indeed the one problem Blain could not solve for him. 'But by the same token…'

'She may already have passed through.'

'Yes. She may.'

'My enquiries suggest not. But it's possible, of course. I can't deny it.'

'I shall have to press on, then.'

'A pity. Lizzie and I have enjoyed your visit.'