The Rising Storm

sight of another regiment hastily forming up outside the Louvre. But when the coach turned south to cross the Seine the sound of distant shots, coming across the river from the eastern quarter of the city, suddenly impinged upon his consciousness. The shooting was mainly spasmodic, but now and then punctuated by fusillades of musketry, so it seemed evident that some­thing serious was afoot.

As the coach was temporarily brought to a halt by a block at the entrance of a narrow street on the far side of the river, Roger thrust his head out of the window and shouted to a group of loungers on the corner: 'What is the cause of that shooting ? What is going on over there in the Faubourg St. Antoine?’

Seeing the gold lace on his hat most of the group gave him only dumb, surly looks; but a big fellow, bolder than the rest, shouted back: 'They have unearthed an agent of the Queen—one of the pigs she pays to force down the workers' wages—and are burning his house about his ears. May the flames consume him!'

The suggestion that the Queen employed agents to force down wages was, to Roger, palpably absurd; but he felt quite sickened by the episode because the big fellow had an open, honest face, and obviously believed what he had said.

On arriving at his inn he enquired again what had caused the trouble, but could get no coherent account from anyone. Apparently it had started the previous night as a factory dispute and had flared up again early that afternoon into a major riot, to quell which it had proved necessary to call out the troops. None of the people he spoke to could tell him why the Queen should be involved in such a matter, but most of them were convinced that she was at the bottom of it.

Irritated and disgusted by their ready acceptance of these evil, unsupported rumours about her, he ordered supper, ate it in morose silence, then went up to his room.

Having unpacked the things that he had bought at the stationer's that afternoon, he spread them out on the table and sat down to it. Then he took the Queen's letter from the capacious pocket of his coat and got to work.

The task he had set himself was no easy one, as his object was to form a cypher within a cypher; so that should the despatch fall into the hands of anyone who already knew Madame Marie Antoinette's private code, or be given to someone as clever as Mr. Pitt's cypher expert, they would still not be able to decipher it in the first case, or break it without extreme difficulty in the other. Yet the process must be accomplished according to a set of rules simple enough for him to carry in his own mind; so that on delivering the re-coded copy to the Grand Duke he would be able to tell him how to turn it back into the Queen's cypher. A further complication was that he dared not make any drastic alteration in the symbols or formation of the letter, as if he did and the re-coded copy was stolen from him by someone who knew her cypher at sight, they would immediately recognize it as a fake.

For over an hour he tried out various transpositions, until he had formulated one which he felt was as good as any he could devise; then he began to write on his parchment, forming each letter with great care, so that when he had done the re-coded copy had a superficial resemblance to the original. Having finished, he uncorked a bottle of wine he had brought up with him, had a drink, and attended to certain other matters he had in mind; after which he inserted his copy in the thick envelope that had previously contained the Queen's letter, warmed the underside of the wax seals that he had lifted and carefully resealed it.

The job had taken him the best part of five hours, so it was now well after midnight; but he had no thought of bed. Instead, he sat down to the table again and commenced a letter to Mr. Pitt. He had already sent one despatch, before leaving Paris for Fontainebleau, making a general report on the situation as far as he could then assess it/But since that he had had his invaluable interview with de Perigord, spoken personally with the Queen, and spent a whole evening listening to the views of a group of noblemen who were among her most intimate friends; in addition he had to explain the reason why he was temporarily aban­doning the work he had been given to undertake a mission to Italy; so there was much to say.

Fortunately he possessed the gift of expressing himself as fluently on paper as in speech, so his pen moved without hesitation while filling page after page with fine writing; but, nevertheless, it was close on three in the morning before he finally rose from the table and began to undress.

In consequence he slept late, but even when he woke he did not hurry to get up; and, having rung for his breakfast to be brought to him, he found his mind turning to the Senorita d'Aranda.

He had not given her a thought since they had parted two nights before, but now her long, oval face and striking black eyebrows re­appeared in his mental vision with extraordinary vividness. Idly, he wondered what would have transpired if she had been remaining on at Court, and on his return from Italy he had followed his impulse to develop her acquaintance. Although that acquaintance had been very brief, from the beginning she had made no effort to disguise her interest in and liking for him. She was clearly no coquette but a straightforward person, so if he had laid siege to her it seemed highly likely that an affaire would have developed between them.

Roger had no desire to marry, but even had he felt that way inclined, he knew that there could be no question of making Isabella d'Aranda his wife. For him it would have been a brilliant match, as she was the daughter of the greatest man in Spain after King Carlos, and her family were immensely wealthy. But for that very reason they would never have countenanced her marrying a simple gentleman of modest means such as himself. Moreover, as a Spaniard she would certainly be a Catholic, while he was a Protestant, and mixed marriages at that date were still regarded by both sides with abhorrence.

He knew well enough that no platonic affaire would have kept him interested for long, and wondered if he could have made her his mistress. As she had been so long in France, and high society there indulged in perpetual immoralities covered only with a graceful cloak of elaborately observed conventions, it was quite possible that she had been the mistress of one or more men already; and, if so, her seduction would not prove very difficult. On the other hand she was unmarried, and so by convention still forbidden fruit to the more scrupulous courtiers; and the Queen was known to regard any immorality on the part of her ladies with great severity. All things considered, Roger thought it unlikely that Isabella had as yet taken a lover.

But she would, of course, as soon as she was married. All women of her rank married whoever their parents chose for them, so love did not enter into such alliances; and it would have been considered unnatural in them had they failed to take a succession of lovers after­wards. Somehow, though, Roger did not see Isabella going to bed with one man after another. She was too intense to become promiscuous. He thought it much more likely that she would become desperately enamoured of some man who possessed brains as well as looks, probably someone considerably older than herself, and remain faithful to him, perhaps for life, or at all events as long as he remained faithful to her. Then, after he died or left her, she would be heartbroken for a while, but eventually get over it and find solace in her children.

If that were so, it would have proved no easy matter to make her his mistress, had he had the chance, and he knew that he would not have attempted to do so had he found her to be still a virgin. All the same, her very intensity was a sign that once aroused she would be capable of great passion; and Roger, having known Georgina, greatly preferred really passionate women who met a man half-way, to the kind that pretended to faint, then suffered an attack of conscience and wept copiously afterwards.

Still, the question of whether Isabella's hidden fires had yet led her to indulge herself in gallantry, or not, was of no moment now. If she had left Fontainebleau the day before, as she had said she intended to do, she would by now have accomplished the first stage of her long journey to Spain. At a rough calculation he estimated that she would have spent the night at Pethiviers, or even perhaps have got as far as Orleans. In any case when he took the road to Italy their ways would diverge further apart each day, so it was waste of time to speculate further about her.

Dismissing her from his mind he finished his breakfast, then made a leisurely toilette. At a quarter past ten he left the inn and, as on the previous day, finding no hackney-coach in the vicinity took an omnibus down to the Pont Neuf. Then he once more walked along the Quai de Louvre and crossed the Jardin des Tuileries. On its far side he entered a small cafe, sat down at a table and ordered a glass of Jerez wine. It was now close on eleven o'clock and he had come there to keep a rendezvous he had made the previous day.

If, while posing as a Frenchman, he had been noticed going into the British Embassy on several occasions by any of his acquaintances, or a police-agent stationed in the quarter, that might have aroused most unwelcome suspicions; but he had to keep in touch with it, both for drawing funds from time to time and to send in his reports, so that they might be despatched to London in the security of the Embassy bag.

To get over the difficulty, he had arranged with Mr. Daniel Hailes, who, apart from the Ambassador, was the