The Lightstep

• Title
  
• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Dedication
  
• Notes
  
• PART I: CROSSING July 1793
  
  • Chapter I Crossing
    
• PART II: THE SISTER May 1797
  
  • Chapter II A State of Germany
    
  • Chapter III Fall of an Empire
    
  • Chapter IV The Wounded Hand
    
  • Chapter V Written in Grief
    
• PART III: THE FEARFUL CITY June–October 1797
  
  • Chapter VI The Gallant in Mourning
    
  • Chapter VII The Count in the Coffee House
    
  • Chapter VIII The Bridge and the Barge
    
  • Chapter IX The Letter from Wetzlar
    
  • Chapter X The Prince
    
  • Chapter XI The Priest
    
  • Chapter XII In the Barrack Room
    
  • Chapter XIII Ways and Means
    
  • Chapter XIV Vulture
    
  • Chapter XV The Gathering
    
  • Chapter XVI A Word
    
  • Chapter XVII Alleys in the Mist
    
• PART IV: THE HOUSE OF THE GREEN JUDGE November 1797–January 1798
  
  • Chapter XVIII The Plundered Land
    
  • Chapter XIX The Name
    
  • Chapter XX The Breach
    
  • Chapter XXI The Maimed Colossus
    
  • Chapter XXII The Madman's Easel
    
  • Chapter XXIII The Scent of Danger
    
  • Chapter XXIV The Path from the Liberty Tree
    
  • Chapter XXV The Lost Border
    
  • Chapter XXVI The Reading Glass
    
  • Chapter XXVII The Testimony of Papers
    
• PART V: THE DOORS OF HEAVEN January–March 1798
  
  • Chapter XXVIII Candlemas Ball
    
  • Chapter XXIX The Painted Room
    
  • Chapter XXX A Turning in the Road
    
  • Chapter XXXI Confession
    
  • Chapter XXXII The Last Dance
    
  • Chapter XXXIII Third Night
    
  • Chapter XXXIV The East Wall
    
  • Chapter XXXV The Grate
    
  • Chapter XXXVI Before the Doors
    
• Cast List
  
• Acknowledgements
  

The Lightstep

www.rbooks.co.uk

John Dickinson

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ISBN 9781407042978

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First published in Great Britain
in 2008 by David Fickling Books
a division of The Random House Group Ltd

Copyright © John Dickinson 2008

John Dickinson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact,
any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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ISBN: 9781407042978

Version 1.0

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2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

To Pippa

Three years after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the new republic
of France declared war on the old regimes of Europe. Chief among these
was the Holy Roman Empire, a loose confederation of mainly German
princedoms and bishoprics under the leadership of the Austrian
Hapsburgs.

The French revolutionaries hoped that the peoples of Europe would rise
against their rulers. However, only a few small uprisings occurred, in
Belgium and in Germany. The men who led these efforts may have been
inspired by the revolutionary ideals of liberty and equality, but fate was
cruel to them. Their causes did not prosper.

In the summer of 1793 a French army was occupying the German city
of Mainz, with the support of some of its citizens. Austrian, Prussian
and other German forces had arrived to retake the city. The siege lasted
for months.

A young man saw his dreams broken. He saw that he had
helped to betray them. That was why he came to hate.

That was why Michel Wéry, once a petty gentleman of
Brabant, was in Mainz in the spring and summer of 1793. It was
why, on a dimming July evening, he followed a guide from his
cellar shelter on the first stage of a long journey.

He was a tall man. His brow was high, rounding backwards
into the soft browns of his hair. Hunger had hollowed his face
and pinched his neck. His skin had lost its natural tan. It was
blotched and bad after the months spent penned in the city. His
whiskers straggled over his cheeks and throat. His eyes were sunk,
and the skin in the pits was brown, as if it had been stained. The
downward jut of his nose lent him a hawkish look, as he glanced
to left and right for signs of danger.

Beneath his greatcoat he was naked to the waist.

He had emerged in the shadow of a ruined church.
The church had once been beautiful, with tall windows and a
steep-pitched roof reaching up three-quarters of the height
of its octagonal tower. On the tower there had been a clock-face
with gilded hands, and an onion-dome like the cap of a
priest. But the roof was fallen, the clock stopped, the dome gone
altogether. The stones were streaked with great tongues of
soot and the timbers were charred by fire. Wéry did not look up.

A sound swelled in the air, passing overhead – the liquid hum
of a cannon-ball, followed by the crash. (And where did that one
fall? The cathedral again? The house of some citizen?) Here came
another. Wéry did not duck. Ducking did no good.

The street was empty and scattered with rubble. It was
scattered too, with a thick layer of earth and dung, laid by once proud
citizens to damp the impact of mortars and solid shot
firing into the town. The dung was everywhere, moist and dark
after the recent wet weather. It coloured the cobbles and the
lowest few inches of the house walls with its foul brown stains.

Everything must stink. Wéry knew that he too must stink, but
he had lost the sense of it long ago.

The guide caught his arm. The two men hurried down the
street and across the Square of Our Lady. To their left rose
the huge, six-towered, red-stone cathedral. Part of the great roof
had collapsed. The east towers stood like broken teeth, wrecked
by fire. In the porches were carved the figures of fiends, blank eyed
and grinning. Wéry did not see them as he passed. The
fiends went on grinning after he had gone.

The houses were half-timbered, with elaborate diagonal
patterns of black and white. They were tall, under steep roofs, and
their upper storeys leaned out over the streets. But the doors were
fast and the windows shuttered. Few if any people were inside
them. The inhabitants were crammed into cellars and crypts
across the town, sheltering from the bombardment. The streets
were empty. Even the population of stray cats had vanished,
because the people were hungry now, and in the lulls they would
come out to hunt anything they could eat. They would hunt for
food, and for firewood, and the ragged republican militiamen
would beat up and down the streets and scream at them to
observe the curfew. But they would come out all the same. They
were weak and desperate. When the sickness came, it would kill
them in hundreds.

At the end of the street a row of houses had been gutted by
fire. The house fronts leaned dangerously outwards. The roofs
were gone and the windows were as empty as the eyes of
skeletons. And another ball smashed uselessly into tiles somewhere
close by.

Not long ago the defenders had sneered at the shot, when they
saw how few killed anyone. They had been brave, and laughed.
But bravery starved. Courage was wearing away. They did not
sneer now. And in the darkness, sometimes they wept. Rumour
said that the French garrison was negotiating its surrender. The
French would abandon their allies, the Mainz republicans.
The republicans could not hold the city alone. They would have
no escape from the revenge of the besiegers, and of their own
townspeople.

Order was breaking down. Commands were not obeyed any
more. Tasks that should have been done were not done. Down by
the waterfront, under the walls of the baroque palace, a corpse lay
unburied. It was a republican militiaman, shot by firing squad.
The dead man's arms lay flung wide, like a victim of crucifixion.
Someone had taken his musket and coat and boots, but then they
had left him here, in a pool of his own blood.

Beside the body Wéry and his guide crouched and waited. The
guide was scanning the waterfront fortifications. There were not
many defenders here, because the Rhine protected this side of the
city from assault, and because the fortifications themselves were
dreadfully exposed to enemy cannon fire from across the river. All
the same, the two men did not want to be seen, or stopped or
questioned.

As his guide peered around the corner of the palace building,
Wéry gathered his breath. His eyes rested on the corpse beside
him.

The face, twisted with shock and pain, was familiar, but he
could not remember the man's name. The cheeks were hollow,
the eyes rolled their whites at the sky. The mouth was open in a
silent howl. The teeth were bad and bloody, and many of them
were missing. The shirt was lifted halfway up his chest, showing
how tightly the skin had drawn over the ribs, and how it swelled
over the pot-belly. Hunger did that. It had done the same to
Wéry. But this man would not be hungry any more.

Something was moving around the dead man – something
crawling or trembling on the dung-scattered cobbles at his
shoulder. Yes, lice: a small tide of lice, creeping out from the filthy
collar, leaving the body as it cooled, looking for some other way
to live now that their host was dead. Wéry had seen that before.
The man must have died in the last hour. He must have been shot
by the very men to whom he was going. Did anyone remember
why?

Lice were everywhere, like the dung. Wéry had them too.

'Come on!'

The two men scuttled into the open space between the palace
and the low river wall. The wall was littered with rubble and
wrecked guns. The few serviceable cannon were silent and unattended
for want of powder. Here the two men were most at risk
from enemy shot. But now, after the close, hellish world of the
city streets, they could see.

It was sunset. The air moved, cool and steady on the skin. To
their left the palace was a shadow – a mass of black shapes of roofs
and gables, battlements and the cupola of the corner tower, all
outlined in living gold. To their right, across the grey flow of the
Rhine, the thick light yellowed on the hills. Smoke gathered
around the complex of earthworks at the bridgehead on the east
bank, which was still held by the French garrison. Beyond, out on
the slopes, more smoke-plumes trailed across the land. Peeping
among them were the brown lines of the nearest trenches and
batteries aiming inwards at the city. As they hurried along the
waterfront Wéry saw the low bank of smoke grow suddenly, in a
thick, silent puff. He heard the ball drone by, and the distant
thump of the gun. That was the Prussians firing. The Prussians
always seemed to have ammunition.

Ahead of them, beyond the corner of the palace and the
bastion at its feet, the Rhine bent westward. It curled through
three long river-islands that lay like dead whales in the flow. On
the far bank the attacker's lines curled to follow it: first the
Saxons, Wéry knew, then the Franconian contingent, and then
the Prussians again, camped at both ends of the bridge of boats
that linked their positions on the far bank with the main besieging
force, dug in around the town on this side of the river.

Breathless, the two men reached the bastion at the foot of the
squat little corner tower of the palace. They threw themselves
down in the shelter of the low wall.

There were men in the bastion. They were a handful of the
Mainz republican militia, posted here because it was not one of
the immediate points of danger which the French felt they must
guard for themselves. They were a ragged and filthy crew, ill-armed,
with a mix of cross-belts and military-style coats over the
remains of civilian clothes. There were patches on their elbows,
long whiskers on their cheeks, and their feet were bare or tied
with rags.

Their commander was another young man, once a student at
the Mainz university. He was short, hatless, with wild dark hair
and heavy brows. He crouched at the parapet, looking somberly
over the rubbled lip of the wall at the batteries on the far bank.
It was he who had ordered the killing of the man by the palace,
half an hour before. If that weighed upon him yet, no one could
tell.

'Jürich,' called one of his followers hoarsely. 'Hey, Jürich!'

The bastion commander looked around.

'The Belgian's here.'

Another ball moaned inwards. Somewhere nearby a fire must
have started, because there was smoke in the air.

The commander beckoned. Wéry crawled over to him.

'Look downstream,' said the commander.

Wéry lifted his head above the battlement.

'The islands are held by the French, still,' muttered the bastion
commander. 'They will be watching out. They'll watch harder as
the dusk falls. The main flow of the river is this side of them. You
must stay this side, too. Stay with the current until you pass the
last of them. Then you must strike for the far shore. Save your
strength for that. If you leave it too late you'll be swept down to
the bridge, and the Prussians will shoot you in the water.
Understand?'

Wéry peered down at the islands, now fading into the dusk.
There seemed to be very little space between the tail of the last
French-held island and the Prussian bridge. Very little, for a half-starved
man who must swim that great current at night.

'I understand,' he said simply.

'Now. Follow the line of the bridge inland on the far side.
There. That encampment. Look – you can see the fires, now.
That's what you are making for. They're troops of the Franconian
Circle – mostly from the Erzberg bishopric. See it?'

'Yes.'

'You must surrender as soon as you have a chance – to the
Franconians if at all possible. Ask for the Erzberg contingent, and
then for an officer called Adelsheim. If you find him, you use my
name. Understand?'

Wéry was still trying to measure the distance he would have
to swim, and weighing the chances of reaching the far bank
before he was swept down to the bridge.

'This officer,' he said at last. 'This Adelsheim. How do you
know him?'

The bastion commander grimaced. 'My cousin was his
governess. She taught him French. She still lives in their house.'

Wéry shrugged at the human ties that had been ruptured by
war. 'Will he get me to the Imperial Headquarters?'

'No. His superiors will have to do that. But you must ask for
him first, for your own safety.'

Wéry's eyes brooded on the river – the great, grey river, cold
and heavy, that drowned men every year. Darkness cloaked the far
bank, where soldiers patrolled with muskets and would shoot at
any sight or sound. As he watched, one of the batteries on the far
bank loosed all its guns together, and a pale light flickered in the
clouds of smoke.

Drone, drone, drone and
thump-thump.
And crash.

Crash, thought Wéry absently. The sound of another dream
breaking.

The two men shared so many things. Both were radicals, who
had taken arms to overturn the old, privileged order in their
homelands. Both had looked to the new republic of France for
help. They had heard and believed the calls of a common freedom
sounding from Paris. But Wéry had seen his new state of Belgium
betrayed and abandoned. And now France was about to betray
the republic of Mainz, too. In the struggle of the great powers
there was no room for the little causes any more. There was only
a lethal, dwindling game to be played and played until it was lost.
No power was truly a friend.

'I've been saying goodbye to your uncle,'Wéry murmured.

The man Jürich glanced sharply at him. His uncle was no
sympathizer with the city republic. He had come to Mainz to
extract his nephew before war closed the city gates, and had been
trapped there by the siege. 'And?'

'Small comfort. He understands that you are trying to open
negotiations with the Empire. But he thinks it is too late. He says
the Imperial commanders won't listen to you. He says they don't
have to. They'll deal with the French. The French will leave, and
the Empire will come in and pick up the pieces. Why promise
anything to men who rebelled against their own prince?'

The bastion commander looked at him somberly 'And what
do you think?'

Wéry grinned. 'I agree, of course. But I'll still go for you.' He
added softly, 'My rule now is to decide first what Paris would
want me to do. Then I do the opposite. And those fellows over
there are less likely to shoot me than they are you. My crime
against them was a while ago.'

The bastion commander nodded. He gestured to his followers.
'The rope.'

The rope was fastened to the carriage of a wrecked gun. Over
the parapet it went, long and dark and snaking in the dusk. There
was a faint splash as it touched the water. Wéry took it just below
the knot and tugged hard, flinging his weight backwards. The
dead gun did not move.

'Good, then.'

A whisper, hoarse and urgent, from the upstream side of the
bastion.

'The boat! Look out, lads! The boat!'

A sudden flurry broke out on the bastion top. Down in the
river, the boat patrol was approaching. Now that it was dark, it
was safe for the French to put armed men on the river, rowing
up and down outside the walls to guard against any attempt by
the besiegers to cross over the river by stealth – and to catch anyone
who tried to leave the city without permission. Men hurried
to the downstream side of the bastion and began to haul up the
rope.