As they talked the wine was kept in constant circulation. It was not the habit to drink so heavily in France as in England, and the wine, although a rich Anjou, was considerably lighter than the Port to which Roger was accustomed. Nevertheless, by the time de Vaudreuil's friends retired, Roger was carrying a good load, so on going to bed he thought no more of his worries and, within a few minutes of his head touching the pillow, was sound asleep.
However, when he awoke in the morning, the danger in which he lay recurred to him with full force, and over a breakfast of chocolate and crisp rolls, which was brought to him in bed, he tried to assess his chances of escaping the Queen's anger.
He felt now that he had been extremely rash to return to France without having made quite certain that the old charges against him in connection with de Caylus's death had been quashed, as he had believed them to be. Soon after his escape to England, in the late summer of '87, his dear friend, the Lady Georgina Etheridge, had offered to arrange the matter. The ravishing Georgina had, at that time, numbered amongst her beaux the recently appointed French Ambassador, Monsieur le Comte d'Adhemar; and she had said that, having regard to the true facts, it should be easy for her to get the murder charge withdrawn, which would then reduce the affair to the much less heinous one of duelling.
Roger had gladly accepted her offer, and written out a long statement for her to hand to the Ambassador. As he knew that such personal matters were always subject to long delays before being dealt with, he had not pressed for an answer. He had been content to accept, via
Georgina, d'Adhemar's assurance after reading the statement that, if it was substantially true, the King would inflict on the culprit no more than a sentence of a year's banishment; and as nearly two years had elapsed since his deed he had had good reason to suppose that he need fear no repercussion from it.
On thinking matters over, he assumed that the Queen would now have him handed over to the police for indictment before a magistrate. If that occurred he could demand that the papers revelant to the original affair should be produced, and with any luck d'Adhemar's recommendation would be found among them, or, if Fortune really decided to smile on him again, a pardon by the King might come to light. On the other hand there was the unpleasant possibility that the Ambassador's report had never got as far as His Majesty, and in that case only the Queen's clemency could save him from being tried for murder.
His thoughts shifted to a murder trial that was still vivid in his memory. Barely six weeks before he and Georgina had been very near paying for their year-old love affair by finding nooses round their necks. The odious publicity of the trial had sent her hastily abroad, and she was now with her clever, indulgent father in Vienna.
He wondered how she was faring there, but had little doubt her splendid health and amazing vitality were carrying her triumphantly through an endless succession of parties. He felt certain, too, that being the wanton hussy that her hot half-gypsy blood had made her, she would have added another lover to the long list of handsome gallants she had taken since she had first been seduced by a good-looking highwayman. Whoever she was allowing to caress her dark beauty in the city on the Danube now—be he Austrian, German, Hungarian or Czech— Roger had good cause to think him a monstrous lucky fellow, for he had laid siege to and won quite a number of lovely ladies himself, yet not one of them could offer Georgina's rare and varied attractions as a mistress.
But she meant far more to him than that. They were both only children, and it was she who had filled the place of almost a brother, as well as a sister, to him in their early teens. Then, in a moment when he needed self- confidence above all else, she had led him to think that he was initiating her into the mysteries of love, although in reality she was initiating him, for he was the younger, and not yet sixteen. It was she who had given him the jewels that de Roubec had stolen, and whatever love affairs they might have when apart they always returned to one another as confidants and friends.
Again his thoughts shifted, this time to his last interview with Mr. Pitt, and in his mind he began to live through the scene once more.
As on two previous occasions the Prime Minister had asked him down to Holwood, his country residence near Bromley, for a Sunday, in order to give him his instructions at leisure and in private. Two old patrons of Roger had been there, whom he had first known as Sir James Harris and the Marquis of Carmarthen; but the former had been raised to the peerage the preceding year as Baron Malmesbury, and the latter—from whom, as Foreign Secretary, Roger always received the funds for his secret activities—had, only that week, succeeded his father as Duke of Leeds. Pitt's shadow, the cold, unbending but upright and indefatigable William Grenville, had also been there, providing by his unapproachable hauteur a strong contrast to the gracious charm of the new Duke and jovial warmth of the recently created peer.
Mr. Pitt never concealed from such close friends as these the object of the missions upon which he sent Roger, so after they had dined the talk turned to the state of France, and European affairs in general.
All of those present felt convinced that in its absolute form the French monarchy could not survive much longer, but not one of them believed that the political unrest in France would culminate in the type of Great Rebellion that had cost King Charles I his head, and led a hundred and forty years earlier to Britain for a time becoming a Republic.
They argued that whereas in England the commercial classes had been supported by a large section of a free and powerful nobility against the King, the nobility of France had become too decadent to weigh the scales either way; that even the
The general opinion, too, was that France must continue to be . regarded as a menace to Britain. They had all lived through the Seven Years' War, in which Pitt's father, the great Chatham, had led Britain from victory to victory, so that at its end France lay beaten and humbled, her hopes of Empire in Canada and India forever shattered, her fleets destroyed and her commerce ruined. But they had also witnessed her remarkable recovery, and lived through the desperate years in which, while Britain was endeavouring to suppress the risings of her rebellious Colonists in the Americas, she had been threatened with a French invasion at home, and had stood alone against a world in arms under French leadership.
They were all Englishmen who had been brought up in the hard, practical school that had been forced to regard the interests of other nations as of secondary importance provided that their country could continue to hold her own. Pitt alone among them had the vision to see that a new age was dawning in which the prosperity of Britain would depend on the welfare of her neighbours across the narrow seas.
As they talked of those grim days when half Britain's immensely valuable possessions in the West Indies were lost to France, and the long-drawn-out siege of Gibraltar had been raised only at the price of withdrawing the main Fleet from American waters, so that from lack of supplies and reinforcements a British army had been compelled to surrender at York Town, Grenville said:
'Whatever the late war with France may have cost us it cost her more; for 'twas finding so many millions to support the Americans which has resulted in her present state of near bankruptcy.'
'I have always heard, sir,' put in Roger with some diffidence, 'that her embarrassment is due to the vast sums spent on building by King Louis XIV and the almost equally great treasure that King Louis XV squandered on his mistresses, the Pompadour and the du Barri.'
'Nay,' Grenville replied ponderously, with a shake of his heavy head. 'You are wrong there, Mr. Brook. 'Tis true that for generations the ICings of France have dissipated a great part of the nation's income on their own pleasures or aggrandizement; but none the less the financial situation was by no means beyond repair when Louis XVI ascended the throne, some quarter of a century ago.'
' 'Tis true,' Pitt agreed, 'and although the King is in many ways a weakling, he has ever displayed a most earnest desire to economize. His progressive cutting down of his Household, and the disbandment of two entire regiments of Royal Guards, are ample evidence of that. I judge Mr. Grenville right in his contention that the Royal Treasury might again be in ample funds, were it not that it has never had a chance to recover from the huge drain upon it caused by France going to the assistance of the Americans.'
'Their interference in our business cost us dear at the time,' remarked the Duke of Leeds smoothly, 'but now we should benefit from their folly; for whatever changes they may bring about in their system of government, poverty will continue to reduce their ability to challenge us again for a considerable time to come.'
Malmesbury had spent half a lifetime as a British diplomat in Madrid, Berlin, St. Petersburg and The Hague,
