a more sober tone, âI no longer wonder now at your anxiety to secure a peace. Yet I see no way to it short of betraying our Austrian allies and submitting to ignominious terms.â
âThat I would never do,â replied the Prime Minister haughtily. âNor, did I make such proposals, would His Majesty consent to them.â
âDo you believe, Sir, that the Austrians will stand equally loyally by us?â
âI believe the Emperor has the will to do so, but whether he has the means is another question. Only this week I received from him a request for a further one million two hundred thousand pounds. He asserts that without it he will be unable to pay his troops through to the end of this yearâs campaign.â
âIs it your intention to let him have it?â
âLegally, I cannot do so without the consent of Parliament, and the House does not reassemble until October.â
âBy then he would receive it too late for the purpose he requires it.â
âI had thought to shelve the matter, hoping that by the late summer the French would find themselves compelled to enter into negotiations for a general pacification.â
Roger turned away to gaze out across the battlements. Far below some children were paddling in the gently creaming surf. The blue-green sea was calm, the sun glinting on its wavelets. A few miles out a brigantine with all sail set was heading down Channel. Otherwise the sea stretched unbroken to disappear in a heat-haze on the horizon. Without looking at Mr. Pitt, he said:
âShould it be not France, but Austria, that has to give in through lack of funds, the whole power of the Republic will be turned against us. You must face it, Sir, that before this time next year we would then be at death-grips with General Buonaparteâs troops upon these very beaches.â
The Prime Minister sighed. âYour having brought to my attention this new source of wealth which will keep the French fighting, I dare not ignore that possibility. It is clear, too, that in the Austrian armies lies our only hope of checking Buonaparteâsadvance, and with it this flow of gold; so it has become more necessary than ever to keep them in the field. Let us go down to my room and from a map endeavour to judge the way in which the campaign is likely to develop.â
Picking up the decanter and his glass, he led the way down a flight of stone steps, through a low nail-studded oak door, and so back to the room in which he had received Roger that morning. It had no great map of Europeâsuch as one might have expected to find pinned up on the wall of the study of the leader of a nation at warâbut Mr. Pitt took from a shelf a well-thumbed atlas and flicked over its leaves until he came to the map of Italy.
It was a patchwork of different colours. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, embracing all southern Italy and the great island of Sicily, was the largest. Next in size came the Kingdom of Sardinia, consisting of that island, together with Savoy and Piedmont in the north-west, which, in the previous month, had been conquered by General Buonaparte. The whole middle of the peninsula was occupied by the States of the Church and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Above them lay a mosaic of smaller states: the Republics of Genoa and Lucia, the Dukedoms of Parma, Modena, Mantua and Milan, and, spreading over all of the north-east, from near Milan to the Adriatic, a territory as large as Switzerland that was still ruled by the Serene Republic of Venice.
Roger laid a finger-tip on Nice, drew it eastward some way along the Ligurian coast, then twenty miles inland, and remarked:
âThat is the route Buonaparte took, and it was up there in the mountains that he carried out the first part of his plan by driving a wedge between the Piedmontese and General Beaulieuâs Austrians. Alone the Piedmontese had no chance against him, and one most unfortunate result of their surrender is that it