The Old Vengeful

'Major de la Rousseliere served the King, Mr Aske, not the Emperor. And the King invested him with the Cross of St Louis for his distinguished and daring services—in 1779.'

The Professor sat back and regarded them benignly.

'What services?'

'He was a spy, Mr Aske, who specialised in British naval bases. And in 1779, having closely examined all the dispositions of your defences in and around Portsmouth, and working also with the detailed maps supplied by Captain dummy3

Hamilton, he drew up a blue-print for the seizure of the Isle of Wight, Gosport and Portsmouth in that order. All of which were then to be turned into a 'French Gibraltar' thereafter.'

'Huh!' snorted Aske.

'Oh ... do not be too contemptuous of the might-have-been, Mr Aske.' The Professor shook his head, still good-humoured. 'The planning was sound—the troops were available . . . General de Vaux and the Marquis de Rochambeau were to command them . . . and you must remember that your army was then busily engaged in losing the war in America, against General Washington, at the time... It is true that circumstances changed, to render the Franco-Spanish naval squadrons helpless at the crucial time . . . But the plan was sound —the same strategic concept as that the French and the British applied seventy years later, when they set out to take the Crimea and Sebastopol from the Russians, in fact.' He smiled. 'And all this is a matter of record, in the archives of the English section in the Ministries of Marine and War here in Paris. It is well-known, even.'

One of the great might-have-beens, thought Elizabeth.

History was about what happened, and its whole weight endowed the facts after the event with inevitability. But, against all that, there had been so many close-run things—all the useless but tantalising historical cul-de-sacs down which her pupils too often strayed when they were dissatisfied with the facts—' But if Henry of Navarre had not been dummy3

assassinated, Miss Loftus . . .' or ' If Mary Tudor had executed Elizabeth—'

Professor Belperron leaned forward suddenly, elbows on his blotter, hands clasped. 'What is not well-known—what has never been remarked on until now, except in mere footnotes, because it was overtaken by greater events, and bore no fruit ... is what Colonel Suchet was doing in 1812, my friends.'

Now he was not addressing them, but the students of some future class in the ante-room with the table and the chairs: this, translated through what Bertrand Bourienne had said to Paul on the phone, was what must be 'interesting' about Colonel Jean-Baptiste Suchet.

'It comes down, Mr Aske—' the Professor focussed on Humphrey Aske as his main target '—to a question I had never thought to ask myself before, of 1812 . . . Which is: after Russia, what next?'

'The same question Hitler must have asked himself in 1941,'

said Aske, nodding to Elizabeth and Paul in turn.

'Good. Exactly that— good!' From main target Aske was transformed into most promising student. 'As with Hitler, so with the Emperor: after the defeat of Russia—the reckoning with England, Mr Aske.'

Elizabeth shivered. Suddenly the Professor wasn't a little mannikin swinging his legs under his desk, or even a brave Resistance fighter swinging the same little legs on a landing-dummy3

craft in Portsmouth Harbour in 1944, before D-Day. He was the old hereditary enemy of all those battles, from Hastings in 1066 through Tinchebrai and Bouvines and Agincourt, and Fontenay and Blenheim and Saratoga, and Trafalgar and Salamanca and Waterloo—of all those trumpet-calls and drum-beats which had summoned the two neighbours to waste their genius killing each other in fools' quarrels over the centuries.

'But then it would have been the whole world against England, Mr Aske—the infant United States as well as the whole of Europe—'

'Britain, Professor Belperron,' said Paul. 'Britain and the Royal Navy, actually.'

Belperron nodded. 'I give you the Royal Navy, Dr Mitchell—

incomparable, always magnificent . . . but over-stretched by 1812, with the Americans at sea, and a hundred French ships-of-the-line in a dozen European ports, and another hundred on the stocks . . . and the capacity to out-build you from Norfolk in Virginia to Brest and Copenhagen and St Petersburg and Venice . . . the whole world, Mr Aske—not in 1940, or 1914—or 1588 or 1779 . . . but the whole world in 1812—'

'If the Tsar Alexander had given in, Professor,' said Aske.

'But he didn't, did he?'

'But he should have done, Mr Aske. After the Emperor reached Moscow—which Hitler never reached . . . And if the Tsar had made terms then . . . what next, Mr Aske?' The dummy3

Professor shook his head. 'There was no Churchill in 1812—

there were only nonentities—Mr Spencer Percival had been assassinated by a madman, but he was nobody in any case . . . and Lord Liverpool, his successor—he was nobody also . . . and the Duke of Wellington in Spain, with his little army—after Russia, Mr Aske, the Emperor could have ordered half-a-million soldiers to Spain. And where would Wellington have been then?' The if of 1812 was beginning to assume terrifying proportions in Professor Belperron's imagination, and he spread his hands as though to embrace it. ' Make peace, Wellington would have said—because he was a realist. But that might not have been good enough for the Emperor, because he was a realist too, and he knew how England was not to be trusted—England and Europe—

England and Austria, and Prussia, and Austria, none of them were to be trusted . . . But England most of all—so England must be dealt with finally, as the trouble-maker and the paymaster among all the others.' The Professor nodded first at Aske, and then at Mitchell, and even at Elizabeth. 'She must be taught a lesson—that is what I now think he decided.