The Cornish Heiress (32 page)

Hangovers were not exactly a new experience for Philip,
although he had not had one for nearly two months, which possibly added to the
horror of this one. However, he had never had the misfortune of being unable to
sleep off the worst of the effects of overindulgence previously. Thus, when his
valet persisted in trying to wake him after he had mumbled, “Go ‘way.
Laisse-moi
tranquille
,” Philip had struck out at him. He had only meant to push Sorel
away sharply, but the push had struck the valet, who was leaning over the bed,
in the nose with rather more force than Philip intended. Not that he knew
anything about it then. He had sunk back into a blessed unconsciousness—but not
for long.

Being prodded with a cane was also something totally outside
Philip’s experience—with or without a hangover. Naturally, being recalled to
his misery did nothing to reduce the indignity. Philip let out a bellow of rage
which was a terrible mistake. The agony that followed, of course, enraged him
even more, but he was saved from further painful reaction by a trill of
feminine laughter that filled the gasping, agonized silence following his roar
of fury.

For one moment Philip was paralyzed with shock. Could he
have brought a whore home with him to his father’s house? He had been living
with Roger and Leonie since his return from France, partly because it did not
seem to him worthwhile to open his own rooms for the short time before he left
for Cornwall and partly because it was easier to conceal his trips to the
Foreign Office if he slipped into Roger’s carriage. Indeed, he looked enough
like his father in height and body shape and unconsciously copied mannerisms
that, if his face were not clearly seen, he could be mistaken for Roger.

In the next moment a spate of French had relieved his mind
on that score. The intruder, the poker with canes, was Leonie. This was so
astounding—Philip had not been of an age when his father and Leonie married
that encouraged visits from a very young stepmother to his bedchamber, and he
could never remember Leonie entering his room before—that Philip sat up.
Naturally, he was then so taken up with the agony in his head and the urgent
need not to retch that he did not understand a word she said to him. For a
woman who had little experience of drunken men, Leonie had great patience and
sympathy with Philip’s condition. She repeated twice, but more softly, that he
had a letter marked “Urgent” from the Foreign Office.

“Read it to me,” Philip groaned.

“It says ‘Urgent’,” Leonie reminded him, unwilling to
intrude on state secrets.

“All the more reason,” Philip sighed, holding his head. “Do
you think I can see to read?”

Shrugging her shoulders, Leonie broke the seal, but there
was nothing she should not see in the note. It merely summoned Philip to a
conference at eleven o’clock that morning.

“No,” Philip moaned, “I cannot. He has found someone else to
ask me a million stupid questions. I cannot, really, I cannot, Leonie.”

“Now, now,” Leonie soothed, “you will feel much better when
you are washed and dressed. I will send Sorel back, but you must promise,
Philippe, not to beat him again.”

“Beat him? I have never laid a hand on Sorel in my life—oh
anyway, not since I was a baby and he tried to dress me in those velvet and
lace confections my mother fancied, but—”

“I do not think he bloodied his own nose,” Leonie
interrupted severely. Then she softened her tone. “No doubt you did not mean to
do it, but I think you should ask his pardon.”

Since Philip was obviously in no condition to argue, she did
not wait for an answer, and she was kind enough to smother her laughter until
she was out of the room. She explained Philip’s pitiable state to his valet—who
needed no explanation and blamed Leonie rather than his master for the pain and
indignity he had suffered. Leonie had not, of course, explained to Sorel the
need for Philip to be wakened, only insisted that he should be, and the valet
assumed it was some purpose of her own for which she was inflicting this
suffering on his master.

By the time Philip reached the Foreign Office he was capable
of concealing his misery, although it was still acute. They did not, to
Philip’s surprise, remain in Lord Hawkesbury’s office. Instead he was subjected
to another half hour of agony, increased by being jolted over cobblestones and
then a rutted private lane. The resentment built up in Philip, but even his
headache and nausea were quelled—the resentment permanently and the physical
discomfort temporarily—by his surprise at the end of the journey. In an elegant
room, more French than English, he was in introduced to Charles Philippe, Comte
d’Artois, the brother of the current (exiled) King of France.

Philip was asked to repeat yet again his meeting with
Bonaparte and his estimate of the climate of public opinion in France. It was
apparent that his recitation was not at all to the liking of his auditor. Sharp
arrogant questions followed, replete with insinuations concerning Philip’s
prejudice and inability since he was merely English, to understand the French.

“If you mean the fine points of the language,
monseigneur
,”
Philip snapped, “it is my first language, spoken from infancy. My mother was
Solange Amelie Marie de Honimarceau, fourth daughter of the Comte de Langres.
French is the common language of my home even at present, my stepmother being
the eldest daughter and heiress of the late Earl of Stour but born in the
chateau de Saulieu on the lands of her mother, Marie Victoire Leonie de
Conyers. If you mean I lack understanding of Frenchmen, only an idiot, French
or English,
could
have misunderstood. The country is at peace and is
prosperous. I was in Brittany, Normandy, and the Pas de Calais, where the most
bitter resentment could be expected against Bonaparte for the brutal
suppression of uprisings. There were, indeed, individuals who hate him, those
who were directly affected by the cruelty of General Brune, but most of them
blame Brune rather than Bonaparte, and anyway, that was in 1800. Most have
changed their minds. There is law in the land, most officials are just and
honest, and most of all there is work and food for all. Between fear of an army
devoted to and completely in the control of the first Consul and the good
things his rule has brought, there will be no uprising in France in the
immediate future.”

“Yet we have had information exactly to the contrary,”
Hawkesbury put in hastily.

Although he concealed it well, Hawkesbury was considerably
amused by the shock displayed in d’Artois’s face. Surrounded as he was largely
by sycophantic
émigré
courtiers, who lived by the dead rules of
Versailles and whose livelihood in many cases depended on what the comte could
give them, the noble Charles was not accustomed to the blunt truth, especially
not delivered in a voice made irritable by an aching head.

Philip shrugged. “I do not know from whom the information
came or what part of the country he was describing, but if it was an
émigré
he might be self-deceived, my lord. I, as you know, have nothing to gain or to
lose. I tell you what I saw and heard. In the future, when the drain of men and
the pinch of war touch them—or if there are military reverses—the people may
think differently. At present, I could not see any reason to hope that France
wishes to be free of her master.”

“I do not think Méhée de la Touche is the kind of man to be
self-deceived,” d’Artois said frostily.

“Then you give me no choice but to wonder whether he is in
Bonaparte’s pay,” Philip replied with deliberation.

There was a brief, appalled silence before d’Artois broke
out, “That is nonsense! Do you think a man—even such a lunatic as this upstart
Corsican—would pay someone to start a plot against himself?”

“Bonaparte is no lunatic. Do not for a moment deceive
yourself with that pleasant notion. He may be a monomaniac, but he is astute,
brilliant, in his comprehension of the
possible
. He does not dream vague
dreams made up of vapors. He puts thousands of men to work and hundreds of
thousands to train and builds a fleet and an army that will give reality—if he
is not stopped—to his mania.”

“Be that as it may,” d’Artois riposted, “you are ignoring
the question of starting a plot against oneself.”

“But that must be obvious,” Philip hesitated, restraining
the words
even
to you
. “You start a plot against yourself when
you are sufficiently secure, to smoke out any traitors you suspect who are
close to you and concealing their dissatisfaction. I said that the bourgeois
and the lower orders were satisfied. I can imagine, however, that other
ambitious generals, who have seen what Bonaparte has accomplished, might think they
were better fitted for his exalted position than ‘the little corporal’, as he
is called. Moreover, there would always be the chance that some or all of the remaining
house of Bourbon could be lured into his grasp.”

This time the silence lasted so long that Philip looked from
one face to another then closed his eyes. Apparently he had hit a tender nerve
with that last, wild guess. Lord Hawkesbury said something that Philip could
safely ignore, since it was addressed to the Comte d’Artois. Quite suddenly his
headache and nausea had flooded back, made more intense by his distaste for the
comte. If Bonaparte had not demonstrated so clearly his unalterable intention
of destroying “perfidious Albion”, Philip would have preferred him infinitely
to the haughty, stupid, self-important Bourbon.

Fortunately he was not required to continue the
conversation. In a few minutes, as the worst of the effects of his hangover
receded again, he realized that Lord Hawkesbury was taking leave. Philip
managed a civil if unembellished farewell, and they were back in the carriage.
This time, however, Philip was not allowed to suffer in silence. Lord
Hawkesbury embarked on the full tale of the results of Méhée de la Touche’s
information.

The man, well known to the Comte d’Artois, had arrived in
February with a most convincing tale. The Republicans were much alarmed by the
cavalier behavior of Bonaparte. He had reestablished religion, emasculated or
suppressed the elected and appointed bodies designed to help him govern,
extinguished the free press, induced the emasculated Senate to offer him a life
tenure as First Consul, and established a Legion of Honor, which many felt to
be a monarchial institution. In fact, the Republicans felt that the First Consul
meant to make himself king. They were ready to rid France of this incubus. If
they must have a king, they would prefer the rightful monarch so long as he
would rule by constitutional right rather than divine privilege.

The Royalists, whom Bonaparte had granted amnesty and invited
back into France, did not love him any the better for that, Méhée de la Touche
also pointed out. They had been promised far more than they had received. Bonaparte
had refused to return lands purchased from the state during the Revolution.
Even when the lands were still vacant, he had only permitted the recovery of a small
part of what had previously been theirs. What was more, all their ancient privileges
over canals and highways and other public institutions had been withheld. They were
scarcely better off than when they had been in exile. They, too, desired the
return of the rightful king.

For the first time, Méhée de la Touche said, the Royalists
and Republicans were ready to compromise. Both ardently desired the removal of Bonaparte.
The Royalists were now willing to accept a constitutional government if the rightful
king headed it. The Republicans were willing to accept the king if he headed a
constitutional government. Both groups were convinced that they could rouse the
parts of the country in sympathy with them against the foreign upstart who had
seized power because of a few victories really won by other generals who had been
deprived of the honors owing to them.

Some of the events of early 1803 seemed to support de la Touche’s
claims. The need to pass a law to conscript one hundred and twenty thousand in
March implied that Frenchmen were not volunteering to enter the army. The sale of
the Louisiana Territory to the United States in April implied a desperate need
for money on the part of the French government which was Bonaparte, of course—and
a despair with regard to the power to keep the overseas colonies. With such
encouragement the British government had decided to support the plot to overthrow
the rule of the First Consul, particularly after war had been redeclared between
England and France in May.

In August a British cutter had landed Georges Cadoudal, one
of the chief commanders of the Vendéan uprising of 1799, in France carrying drafts
for a million francs to finance the uprisings that were planned in Paris, the Vendée,
and Provence. Since that time various reports had cast considerable doubt on
the real probability of such rebellions actually taking place.

“You aren’t the first to tell us that de la Touche’s hopes were
oversanguine, Philip,” Hawkesbury finished, “that is, if they weren’t
deliberate lies. However, as with the business of the invasion, it was very
difficult to sift out the truth. Likely you are right. Some were paid to lie, some
were sincere and self-deceived. However, we are virtually certain now that there
will be no rebellion, just as you said.”

“I gather d’Artois does not agree with you even now,” Philip
said.

“It doesn’t matter whether he agrees or not,” Hawkesbury
snapped. “We will have no more to do with the matter. If anyone else wishes to involve
himself, it will be without the assistance of this government. However, Georges
Cadoudal is, in some sense, our responsibility. It is necessary to inform him
that no further help will be forthcoming and to offer him a way back to England
if he desires to return here. There was also—er—a promise that a ‘prince’ would
come to lead the uprisings when the moment was ripe. This is now out of the question.”