The Army of the Night Read online

10

  Near Toulouse, France. August 1815

  The pre-dawn hint of sunrise meant that it was time to go; Bellanger did not want to tire his horse by riding it hard in the middle of a summer day. He gave his wife the usual instructions: if he was not back by a certain date she was to assume that he was missing and to inform a certain superintendent at the Bourse, so that his unexecuted transactions could be suspended. She had no idea that this financial official had once been, like her husband, an agent of the Bureau.

  Rather than ride south by way of St. Jean he avoided any chance of meeting its inhabitants and spent that night at a village to its east. The next saw him sleeping once again in the desolate, decrepit tavern — its landlord no less rude than before. ‘Rubbish!’ he declared. If you ask me, you came back here for nothing. What flowers bloom on those black heights?’

  ‘In the mountains, dwarf cudweed still attracts the bees,’ the agent offered. ‘In fact, the slopes above are ideal ground for many plants. Of course; most of them flower in the spring. But to a botanist, dormancy is also an interesting state.’

  ‘Huh. If you want dormancy, study my accounts. I’ve sold only half the beans and flour as last year, so I don’t care how you spend your time, as long as your coin’s still genuine.’

  Bellanger stood at the counter, observing the suspicious innkeeper testing his payment with the point of a knife. Not only are my coins genuine, he mused; they are from my own purse; my old paymaster is gone and I’m making this trip of my own volition. I am here when I could be safe at home— no; that's not true. I really had no choice. I had to come. Am I fearful? Most definitely ...

  After the fateful battle, several weeks passed before Bellanger was able to talk to his master. They met at a hotel in Rochefort on the Atlantic coast, where Napoleon was organizing an attempt to escape to the United States of America. For a recently dethroned emperor he had been oddly cheerful, and had received his agent warmly. Once they were in private he answered Bellanger’s enquiry about the battle: the ‘army of the night’ had attacked the British, as they had promised, but had been repelled. Bellanger asked Napoleon how that information had been transmitted.

  ‘I received this,’ he replied. Reaching into a pocket he removed a miniature red velvet purse, and from it he took a silver musket ball with an inscription on its surface. He handed it to his agent. Bellanger examined it and could just about make out the neatly engraved figures ‘48/117’ and the words ‘Payé en entier’.

  ‘It came via my aide-de-camp,’ the defeated ruler explained. ‘He received it from an equerry, who accepted it from an anonymous but imposing civilian, who told him that, if I did not have it in my hands by the end of that day, then I would want to know why — and I would be asking questions. Clever, eh?’

  ‘Wellington was ready for them? How did he find out?’

  Bonaparte shrugged. ‘If I ever get the opportunity, I’ll ask him. Regardless, he must have prepared his men well. It seems our friends lost nearly half their number and, if that’s true, I have to agree with them; they’ve honored the bargain in full.’ He paused, and Bellanger returned the costly musket ball to him. ‘Now that you’re here, I would like you to do something for me. Obviously, in the circumstances, it is not an order.’

  Few men could refuse a request from a man who had risen from obscurity to become an emperor, and Bellanger was not one of them.

  It proved to be their last encounter. In a matter of days Bonaparte was forced to surrender to the English monarch, who subsequently exiled him to St. Helena — a remote, insignificant, humiliating speck in the vast southern ocean.

  Bellanger accepted the task of delivering Napoleon’s response to the cryptic message on the musket ball, but not only because he had been asked; he also felt that he owed a personal show of gratitude to the men — men? Beings? Creatures? — whom he had bullied into helping his country. He set out on his journey knowing that his welcome would be far from warm; And now, as the dark mountains loomed above him, he expected nothing less than violent hostility. Nervous, he cocked both barrels of his pistol, now packed with extra powder and silver shot. ‘As if that’ll help,’ he muttered. Duty and honor propelled him forward.

  By mid afternoon he was standing in the clearing in front of the immense wall, its towering presence as forbidding as ever. He led his horse to a small patch of coarse grass that struggled to grow in the thin soil, but it declined the opportunity to graze; it was as uneasy and alert as its owner. Bellanger focused his eyes on the top of the wall. Even though he saw no movement he could sense that his presence was already known. He sat down and leaned his back against the rock and waited. He could hear nothing but the coursing of the wind as it blew past the lichened rocks and hissed through the stubborn shrub. The occasional crow wheeled by, cawing socially. Bright birds, he thought, good flyers, too, underestimated by—

  ‘You’re back.’

  He and his horse instantly flicked their heads towards the voice. The man stood silhouetted against the gathering clouds, not two paces from him.

  Bellanger mustered his wits, and stood up. ‘I have good ears, my horse has better, and how you approach so silently I do not—’

  ‘Why?’ The man — the werewolf — was obviously in no mood for small talk.

  ‘I wanted to know if you had survived.’

  ‘They knew about us. They were waiting.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know how the British found out. Your work at Roncevalles and Leipzig obviously gave them clues, but we had no idea they would believe— that they would be prepared for you.’

  ‘We were massacred.’

  It was more than resentment that burned behind the man’s grey eyes. It was hatred — a hatred mixed with a cool, predatory detachment that the agent found especially unnerving. ‘I know. I’ve been asked to give you something.’ He held out the miniscule red velvet purse. ‘You’ll need gloves. And perhaps this.’ With his other hand he offered a magnifying glass.

  The man who had once jokingly given his name as ‘Joan of Arc’ retrieved a pair of worn leather gloves from a pocket of his coat and slipped them on. He took the offered items, opened the bag’s drawstrings and let the silver ball roll into a pig-skinned palm. Looking at it through the glass he saw that under the inscription ‘Payé en entier’ a word had been added; ‘Merci’, followed by two large and flamboyant letters: ‘N B’.

  ‘You have proof that he himself signed this?’

  ‘No,’ Bellanger replied, ‘not exact proof. Nothing written. But he asked me to give you something else. I’ll have to remove my boot. May I?’

  The man nodded, and the visitor took off his left boot and reached inside, pulling and twisting at something in the heel until it came loose and he could bring it into daylight. He held out the object. ‘The imperial seal of His Excellency Napoleon the First, Emperor of the French Empire and King of Italy.’

  The man took it, and the gold ring gleamed against the dark, creased palm of his glove. It bore the engraved portrait of 'the emperor in splendor', encircled by the simple title — written in reverse for stamping purposes — Emperor of the French. He looked up, still sour. ‘So, your master says he’ll keep his promise. Yet he’s lost his country. You’ve lost your job. A million men lost their lives. And I’ve lost nearly half my friends, my companions, my community. For what purpose?’

  Bellanger thought carefully about his answer. ‘The way I see it, I worked for an idea. For a better life than previous rulers gave us. For a new empire. But you — you had no option. You had to fight in order to survive.’

  ‘You’re right, we fought only to survive — to survive the position that you put us in. My friends — my surviving friends — want me to kill you here and now.’

  The agent knew that he should show no reaction, that he should calmly calculate the distance between him and his adversary and judge the time it would take to grasp his pistol, point the barrels at his target and fire. Instead he swallowed, and calculated nothing. There wa
s an unsettling pause before the man spoke again.

  ‘But you shall live,’ he declared. ‘You shall live to spend the rest of your life regretting what you’ve done. Because you’re mistaken about your own involvement, you know.’ His eyes narrowed, and his voice hardened. ‘You thought you worked for a noble cause, but it was the cause of one man’s voracious ego — one man’s greedy ambition, and his insatiable appetite for war. He consumed men’s lives by the thousand and thought nothing of it.’

  Bellanger wanted to deny it, to say again that Napoleon’s ambition was for the good of France, for the betterment of its people. But as the words assembled in his mind, they sounded suddenly hollow, and he couldn’t voice them. The man’s accusations rang true. And they didn’t stop.

  ‘You’re thinking that I and my friends are the ones with the inhuman appetites. Well, think on; we did not choose to be what we are. None of us wanted this disease. But your master — he chose his path. He is the true monster, and you did his bidding. Now go, and may your god forgive you, because we will not.’

  Bellanger bowed his head. Not only had his life been spared by someone who had the means — and, arguably, the right — to take it, he now had to live with the idea that he had been an ardent follower of a false prophet. He said nothing, and gratefully turned away from the wall for the last time.

  He felt chastened and diminished. His nerves were raw and his thoughts were in turmoil. As he followed the darkening trail down towards the valley and the road that would eventually return him to his home and the soft embrace of his wife, he was certain of one thing only; he was lucky, very lucky, to be alive.

  * * *

  About the author:

  Born in Greater London.

  Art school.

  Created TV commercials in London, Milan, New York and San Francisco.

  Some fishing here, photography there.

  A file full of projects waiting to be finished.

  For a change of genre you might enjoy my comedic novella The Wrinkly.

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  ‘Could easily be made into a hilarious movie.’

  And if a contemporary twist on a Shakespearean tale is more your cup of hemlock, several reviewers think you could do worse than The Scottish Movie.

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  Thank you for reading.

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