The Rape of Venice (70 page)

Without flinching, Roger faced the blazing anger in the Corsican's eyes. Sadly he shook his head.
‘Mon Général
, you do me a great injustice. It was not merely to trap these miserable people that I hatched this plot. You have mentioned to me many times that the people of Venice love and honour you; that they are grateful to you for the freedom you brought them; that they are to be relied on when you are gone back to France to maintain an independent City State, governed on
the principles of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It may have been presumptuous of me, but I wished you to see for yourself how ill-founded was your belief. Look at them! There are not only noble ex-Senators here. There are also men of the robe,
bourgeoisie
, and even members of the proletariat. They are representative of Venice. For France and yourself they have only hatred. My object was to unmask them before you.'

With a quick gesture Boneparte waved Roger aside and began to walk up and down, his hands clasped behind him. Six paces forward, six paces back. For a full two minutes he strode back and forth, deep in thought. Suddenly he halted facing Roger, and cried:

‘You are right! They attempted to force me to sign a document re-creating the
Serenissima
with a Doge and all their other outworn trappings. They threatened to carry me off and starve me into ordering the withdrawal of our garrison.' Singing round upon the Venetians he stormed at them:

‘You are a miserable, cowardly people, unfit for liberty. You no longer have land or water of your own. I will take all your ships, despoil your arsenal, remove all your cannon and wreck your bank. Then I will hand you over to the Austrians.'

A wail went up. The Venetians fell upon their knees shouting cries and pleas. ‘No! No! Anything but that! Have mercy on us. We will do whatever you wish. Anything, Anything. We will be loyal to France. We swear it!'

‘Silence!' he snapped. ‘You are incapable of loyalty! I have delayed signing a peace only for your sakes, but I'll delay no longer. The Emperor wants your city; he shall have it. You would make slaves of one another. Very well then; you shall all become the slaves of Austria.'

Roger's heart warmed within him. Whatever might happen now he had cleared the big fence. He had preserved Venice from domination by France. In any future combination of the Powers against her, it would prove a valuable bulwark. By patient intrigue, coupled with audacity, he had once more struck a mighty blow for England.

To Boneparte he said,
‘Mon Général
, you should know that there is one man here more treacherous than all the rest. He joined this conspiracy only to make use of it for his own ends. He has kept in touch with Villetard with the object of betraying his friends to us when the time was ripe and claiming as his reward that you should make him First Magistrate of Venice. Any man so despicable deserves death. He is my personal
enemy, and I ask from you the right to execute him.'

Malderini had taken no part in the fighting or in seizing Boneparte. He had watched the
coup
develop with great satisfaction and, when Junot had arrived with the troops, remained undisturbed. He had been expecting events to take exactly that course and that, when the other conspirators were arrested and led away, Villetard would appear to present him to Boneparte and praise the part he had played. Then, on seeing Roger enter the
salon
, he had suddenly been seized with fear that even if his enemy's presence there were pure chance, it might bring about the wrecking of all his plans. Since, he had been watching the proceedings with mounting dismay and apprehension.

Now, as Roger denounced him, he turned, dived between two soldiers, seized the door-knob of the kitchen door and strove to open it. But it was still bolted on the other side. The two soldiers grabbed him by the shoulders and swung him round.

Pointing at him, Roger cried, ‘That is the arch-traitor! Bring him here!'

Malderini was thrust forward through the murmuring crowd until he was only a yard from Boneparte. His sagging, old-woman's face was grey with terror, but with a great effort he pulled himself together and cried:

‘General, you must hear me. This accusation is false. It is made by a man who bears me a grudge because, believing him to be an English spy, I had him imprisoned in the Leads. But that is not all. As a man you owe me some consideration. What will be said of you if you condemn to death a man whose wife you have stolen?'

‘You must be mad,' Boneparte snapped. ‘I do not know your wife.'

With a bitter, high-pitched laugh, Malderini pointed at Sirisha. ‘Not know her! Why, there she sits. She was brought here for your pleasure. On our entering this room, we surprised you having supper with her.'

Boneparte jerked his head round and fixed his eyes on Roger. ‘Is this true? Have you made use of a political situation to get the best of this man in some private quarrel you have with him?'

‘Yes,' Roger admitted. ‘The Princess is his wife; but it was only by bringing her here I could make quite certain that he would come here with the others. If I had not, he might have
betrayed their intention while himself remaining in Venice.'

‘No, no!' Malderini cried. ‘You are right, General. He has abused your confidence to pursue a private feud. And he has dragged your name in the mud to do it. All Venice knows that for the past few days you have been paying visits in secret to the city, and…'

‘What nonsense is this?' Boneparte burst out. ‘I have never been near the place.'

A sudden murmur arose from the Venetians. ‘Oh, oh!' ‘We are at your mercy; why deny it?' ‘That you have been in the city is common knowledge.'

‘Yes,' Malderini hurried on. ‘And my enemy must have pointed out my wife to you. It is said everywhere that you had displayed an interest in her. Then, this morning, he abducted her in broad daylight to bring her here.'

‘Breuc! What have you to say?' The Corsican's words cracked like pistol shots.

‘I do not deny it,' Roger replied tersely. ‘Rumours that you were in Venice had to be put round to induce the conspirators to plan this attempt to kidnap you. I abducted his wife with the help of a boat-load of French sailors to blaze the trail more surely. Only by so doing could I make certain of luring him here tonight.'

Malderini gave a sudden chuckle. ‘See, General, where this fool's personal thirst for revenge has landed you. We cannot stop you throwing us all into Leads, but what will Venice say? What will the world say? No one will believe that we came here to kidnap you. They will believe that I came here with my friends to rescue my wife from dishonour. They will say that you are a mean, unscrupulous tyrant. That you abused your power to have my wife abducted. That when discovered and reproached, instead of restoring her to me, you were so furious at being actually caught out in your evil design that you decided to do your best to silence us. In the hope of doing so you falsely accused us of this plot, so that you could send us all to prison. And that, to give credence to a serious plot having existed, you have gone to the length of punishing all Venice by throwing her to the Austrians.'

The Venetians had hung breathlessly upon his words, and now, seeing a hope of escaping the penalty for their night's work, they cried: ‘Yes, yes!' ‘He is right!' ‘Everyone will believe that we came here to rescue her.' ‘They'll hold your name infamous.' ‘They'll say you gave us to the Austrians to
cover up a plot that never existed.' ‘Italy has hailed you as the new Caesar; tomorrow you'll be known as another Heilogabolus.'

Boneparte's pale face had gone chalk-white. Once more he turned to Roger, and snarled, ‘You got me into this! Get me out or I'll have you chained for life to an oar in a galley!'

‘And then?' exclaimed Georgina, eagerly. ‘And then?'

Roger had paused in his story to refill her goblet and his own with champagne. Giving a light shrug, he replied, ‘Why, m'dear, being much averse to spending the rest of my life as a galley slave, I was under the necessity of persuading him that he need have no fears for his reputation.'

‘Wretch that you are to tantalise me so!' She stamped a small foot. ‘Unless you had somehow escaped the Corsican's wrath you would not be here. But how? By what trickery? Tell me this moment.'

The ‘here' that Georgina referred to was her boudoir in the Berkeley Square mansion that, as the mother of the young Earl of St. Ermins, she occupied when in London. It was mid-December, very cold and snowing outside; but in the small boudoir, with a good log fire flickering on the ceiling, and the silk-covered walls patterned with Chinese junks, pheasants and pagodas, it was warm and cosy. Instead of having supper served in the chilly dining-room, they had had it sent up there, and now sat at their ease on a deep sofa before the fire.

Roger had arrived in London from the Continent only the day before. After the desperate stand he had made against the Venetian conspirators on Portillo, he had been laid up for a fortnight with his wounds. Meanwhile, on October 17th, Boneparte had signed with Austria the famous peace of Campo Formio.

Later, before he went on to Rastadt to ratify it, Roger had made his wounds the excuse for asking for long leave, stating that he proposed to convalesce in the winter sunshine at his little château near St. Raphael. The General-in-Chief, having no immediate use for him, had granted it but stipulated that he
should report again by the end of January, as by then the Directory would have decided whether he should be given an army for the invasion of England or be allowed to follow his own inclination of leading a French army to conquest in the glamorous East; and in either case he felt that Roger would be valuable to him. Roger had then gone to the South of France, and spent a month there building himself up locally as one of the new post-revolution landed proprietors and an aide-decamp to the now world-famous conqueror of Italy.

Early in December, Boneparte had returned to Paris to receive formal thanks for his amazing victories. The Directory feared him but had to do him honour. To the public he was a national hero and amidst delirious scenes of welcome they acclaimed him as another Caesar. Roger ostensibly left St. Raphael to participate in the triumph of his Chief, but, in fact, he journeyed quietly to Brittany and, through one of his old connections there, had himself landed by smugglers only two nights before in a quiet Sussex cove.

That morning he had spent an hour with Mr. Pitt, reporting his own activities and giving his views on probable French intentions for the furtherance of their war against Britain, now the sole champion remaining in arms against the mighty power that, as a result of the Revolution, was spreading communism and atheism across Europe.

The Prime Minister had been plunged in even greater gloom than when Roger had last seen him. During Roger's absence, Britain had suffered one of the most terrible financial crises in her history, and had survived it only owing to Mr. Pitt's ability and the patriotism with which her monied classes had supported the new loans. The financial situation was still a cause for grave anxiety and the signing by the Austrians of the Peace of Campo Formio had been an appalling blow. As a would-be upholder of the Old Order in Europe, Mr. Pitt was naturally much distressed by the total elimination of the Serene Republic, but Roger had quoted Boneparte's own words to him about the Venetians: ‘This miserable, cowardly people unfit for liberty.' And he had had to agree that Roger had done well to get them handed over to the Austrians, rather than to leave the wealthy and populous city as a pawn in the possession of the French.

Georgina too had been distressed at the sad fate of Venice, and had appreciated the significance of its value in a possible renewal of the Coalition against France only when Roger had
explained it to her that evening. She at once agreed the soundness of the policy he had adopted, but reproached him for having sacrificed to gain his ends the little group of Venetians who had had the courage to enter on a conspiracy aimed at freeing their city from the French.

At that he laughed, and now he told her now, in one move, he had saved both them and Boneparte's reputation.

‘You will remember,' he said, ‘how, that afternoon, I had made an effigy of Boneparte, and left it hidden under some garden chairs? When the Corsican threatened me with the galleys, I sent Crozier to get it and displayed it to them all. The mask was the conventional Venetian long-nosed hideous affair, but, apart from that, the effigy was a good one. In size and appearance it was Boneparte's double, and would certainly have been taken for him had it been seen propped up in a sitting position at anything over a few yards' distance. I then obtained his permission to make my explanation to him in the form of an address to the conspirators, and this is what I said to them:

‘“You have been led to believe that, for some days past, General Boneparte has been living incognito in Venice. The fact is that he has never entered your city. He left the mainland only this evening, and has been resident for the past week at his Headquarters, which are a good day's travel distant from Venice. This can be proved beyond all shadow of doubt. The rumours about his presence in the city are due to people having glimpsed this effigy of him in the cabin of a gondola as it was taken up and down the Grand Canal.

‘Why, you may ask, did we display this effigy? The answer is that we knew that a group of reactionaries was conspiring to overthrow the new Republican régime. The effigy enabled us to bait the trap which has brought you out into the open; and the rumous about General Boneparte's interest in Signor Malderini's wife, followed by her kidnapping, were a part of the same successful plot. That ensured that this arch-traitor would come here with you. Now you have shown your hand you are at the General's mercy.

“Yet, you are right that a stigma might attach to him for the part played by his effigy. That, we cannot permit; and the remedy is to make public to all Venice the manner in which you have been fooled. Given his permission, I propose that you shall all be lodged in the Leads, but, every evening during the next fortnight, you will be paraded for an hour round the
Piazza of St. Mark, in chains, and carrying in your midst the effigy of the General, which you so skilfully and bravely kidnapped.”'