Jane Feather - Velvet

"She was making contact this weekend at the Vanbrugh house in Kent." Talleyrand sipped cognac, gesturing to his guest that he should refill his own glass.

Fouche's fingers around the delicate crystal decanter were thick and coarse, the nails ragged, tufts of hair sprouting on the red knuckles. Talleyrand tapped the tapering white soft-skinned fingers of a pampered aristocrat on the polished wooden arm of his chair.

"What does she know of Praed?" Fouche asked before taking a deep swallow from his liberally recharged glass.

"That he's the cleverest spymaster the English have yet produced… that so far we haven't been able to get close to him… that it's her assignment to do so."

"And provide us with the means to remove him permanently," Fouche declared, smacking his lips as he savored his cognac.

Talleyrand winced slightly. Fouche was so unsubtle. As it happened, removing Nathaniel Praed was the last thing the Minister for Foreign Affairs wanted, but Fouche didn't need to know that. It suited both of them to have Gabrielle infiltrating the English secret service, and they had combined their resources to achieve it. Fouche wanted a double agent in England to enable him to wreak havoc with that nation's secret service, and Talleyrand, much more devious, wanted a line of communication directly into the ear of the English government. Nathaniel Praed via Gabrielle was to be that ear.

For the moment the two men could work together toward their differing goals. If Fouche's goal interfered with Talleyrand's at some future point, then the Minister for Foreign Affairs would deal with it.

"You believe the woman will succeed in infiltrating their system?" Fouche regarded his host with shrewd eyes as he posed the question.

Talleyrand nodded. "Gabrielle's been one of our most resourceful and intrepid couriers for the last five years, throughout her liaison with le lievre noir.This mission requires different skills, of course, but she's a woman of passionate convictions and determination, intent on avenging her lover's murder. She willsucceed."

"I wish to God I knew who'd betrayed him," Fouche declared with a savage twist to his mouth. “To lose our top agent in such fashion! Mon dieu,it makes me want to spit!"

His mouth pursed and Talleyrand grimaced, thinking he was about to suit action to words, but Fouche restrained himself, draining the contents of his brandy-goblet in one gulp.

There was a moment's silence. The fire spurted and a candle flared as a needle of frigid air found its way under the door.

"However," Talleyrand said finally, "as we agreed, there's a way to pull the chestnuts out of this fire. Gabrielle will turn disadvantage to advantage. Once she's gained Praed's trust, she will bring us, among other information, a list of the English agents presently working in France. If Guillaume was betrayed by an English double agent in our own ranks, we'll discover it."

"You're sure there's nothing to connect Gabrielle de Beaucaire with le lievre?"

"Nothing," Talleyrand said firmly. "Their love affair was known only to myself. Gabrielle, as you know, is my goddaughter. Her father was one of my dearest boyhood friends. It was natural that I should offer her my protection when she returned from England after the Revolution. She met Guillaume one night when he was visiting me in secret. They became lovers almost immediately."

A shadow fell over the haughty countenance as Talleyrand remembered the passion of the two young people, the overpowering attraction that had swept them into one of the most turbulent and intense love affairs he'd ever been privileged to promote.

Fouche made no comment. Such liaisons were much more frequent than the fashionable world officially recognized.

"Inevitably with such a passionate affair, Gabrielle discovered the truth about Guillaume and how he served France. I felt he had perhaps yielded up his secrets rather too easily…" Talleyrand shrugged with a half-smile, remembering how he'd rebuked the young man for unprofessional indiscretion. Guillaume had most vigorously defended both himself and his mistress, and he'd been proved right.

"Gabrielle insisted on playing her own part in the service and le lievretrained her as a courier. As her cover, she took part in society as my goddaughter and the widow of the completely fictional Comte de Beaucaire, who, it's believed, died tragically and very suddenly on his estates in the Midi. But her real life she lived in the shadows."

He spread his hands wide. "They met only in the deepest secrecy and waited for the moment when they could live again in the open… marry, have children." He shook his head. "It was not to be."

"No," said Fouche with a touch of impatience. He was a man devoid of sentiment. "And she will seduce this Praed?"

"If necessary."

The bland statement drew a smile from the policeman. "You're as cold-blooded as I am," he commented, rising to his feet. "Notwithstanding the bishop's miter, Talleyrand."

"An excommunicated bishop," Talleyrand corrected calmly, rising with his guest. "One who loves his country. You will leave by the back entrance?" His eyebrows lifted.

"How else?" Fouche agreed. "There are sharp eyes around, and our emperor would not be happy to hear that his Minister for Foreign Affairs and his Minister of Police have secret conferences."

Talleyrand smiled. "D 'accord. Isuspect that our master would regard an alliance between us asmore formidable than another Trafalgar."

"And he'd be correct," Fouche said with another dry smile.

Talleyrand returned to the fire as the door closed on the policeman. He and Fouche made uneasy bedfellows, but they played a game of intrigue where the stakes were of the highest: The Emperor Napoleon was to be toppled from his imperial throne. They would work together toward this goal, using their different techniques and spheres of influence, and one day they would succeed. And when that day came, their uneasy alliance would be shattered as they became rivals for the power vacuum thus created.

Talleyrand sipped his cognac thoughtfully. Fouche knew this as well as he did himself, out until then he was as prepared as Talleyrand to use his arch rival in the interests of expediency.

The world didn't lack for interest, he reflected, taking a copy of Voltaire's Candidefrom the bookshelves. He riffled through it, chuckling at Pangloss's eternal passive optimism: All's for the best in the best of all possible worlds.Disagreement with that particular philosophy was one belief Napoleon's Minister for Foreign Affairs and his Minister of Police had in common. There was always room for change.

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At Vanbrugh Court, Gabrielle slept the sleep of the just, her dreams untroubled by the obstinacy of Lord Nathaniel Praed. She awoke before the maid brought her hot chocolate, feeling as refreshed as if she hadn't spent a part of the night scaling the walls. She sprang from bed and flung open the curtains, looking out on a perfect winter morning with pale early sun sparking off the hoarfrost on the lawn beneath her window.

She craned her neck outside, looking along the creeper-thick facade of the house toward Nathaniel Praed's window, wondering if he'd decided to close it after his nocturnal visitor had left. In the cold light of day, the climb from the gravel path below looked rather more daunting than it had in the night, but she'd been too set on her goal for apprehension then.

She turned away from the window as the maid knocked and entered with a tray of chocolate and sweet biscuits.