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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.
    Fouché 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 liévre
trained 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 Fouché 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?” Fouché 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
. I suspect that our master would regard an alliance between us as more formidable than another Trafalgar.”
    “And he’d be correct,” Fouché said with another dry smile.
    Talleyrand returned to the fire as the door closed on the policeman. He and Fouché 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. Fouché knew this as well as he did himself, but 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
Candide
from 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.
    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