„Is that what you’re doing here?” Kate asked, gesturing to indicate the city beneath them where the French ruled over plundered houses and embittered people.
„Oh, Kate,” Christopher said sadly. „This is progress!”
„Progress?”
Christopher got to his feet and paced up and down the lawn, becoming animated as he explained to her that the world was changing fast about them. „ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth,’ „ he told her,
„ ‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ „ and Kate, who had been told this more than once in her short marriage, suppressed her irritation and listened as her husband described how the ancient superstitions were being discredited. „Kings have been dethroned, Kate, whole countries now manage without them. That would once have been considered unthinkable! It would have been a defiance of God’s plan for the world, but we’re seeing a new revelation. It is a new ordering of the world. What do simple folk see here? War! Just war, but war between who? France and Britain? France and Portugal? No! It is between the old way of doing things and the new way. Superstitions are being challenged. I’m not defending Bonaparte. Good God, no! He’s a braggart, an adventurer, but he’s also an instrument. He’s burning out what is bad in the old regimes and leaving a space into which new ideas will come. Reason! That’s what animates the new regimes, Kate, reason!”
„I thought it was liberty,” Kate suggested.
„Liberty! Man has no liberty except the liberty to obey rules, but who makes the rules? With luck, Kate, it will be reasonable men making reasonable rules. Clever men. Subtle men. In the end, Kate, it is a coterie of sophisticated men who will make the rules, but they will make them according to the tenets of reason and there are some of us in Britain, a few of us in Britain, who understand that we will have to come to terms with that idea. We also have to help shape it. If we fight it then the world will become new without us and we shall be defeated by reason. So we must work with it.”
„With Bonaparte?” Kate asked, distaste in her voice.
„With all the countries of Europe!” Christopher said enthusiastically. „With Portugal and Spain, with Prussia and Austria, with Holland and, yes, with France. We have more in common than divides us, yet we fight! What sense does that make? There can be no progress without peace, Kate, none! You do want peace, my love?”
„Devoutly,” Kate said.
„Then trust me,” Christopher said, „trust that I know what I’m doing.”
And she did trust him because she was young and her husband was so much older and she knew he was privy to opinions that were far more sophisticated than her instincts. Yet the following night that trust was put to the test when four French officers and their mistresses came to the House Beautiful for supper, the group led by Brigadier General Henri Vuillard, a tall elegantly handsome man who was charming to Kate, kissing her hand and complimenting her on the house and the garden. Vuillard’s servant brought a crate of wine as a gift, though it was hardly tactful, for the wine was Savages’ best, appropriated from one of the British ships that had been trapped on Oporto’s quays by contrary winds when the French took the city.
After supper the three junior officers entertained the ladies in the parlor while Christopher and Vuillard paced the garden, their cigars trailing smoke beneath the black cypress trees. „Soult is worried,” Vuillard confessed.
„By Cradock?”
„Cradock’s an old woman,” Vuillard said scathingly. „Isn’t it true he wanted to withdraw last year? But what about Wellesley?”
„Tougher,” Christopher admitted, „but it’s by no means certain he’ll come here. He has enemies in London.”
„Political enemies, I presume?” Vuillard asked.
„Indeed.”
„The most dangerous enemies of a soldier,” Vuillard said. He was of an age with Christopher, and a favorite of Marshal Soult. „No, Soult’s worried,” he went on, „because we’re frittering troops away to protect our supply lines. You kill two peasants armed with matchlock guns in this damn country and twenty more spring up from the rocks, and the twenty don’t have matchlocks any longer, instead they have good British muskets supplied by your damn country.”